Slashdot Mirror
Bug Pushes Vista Out to November 8th
IntelliAdmin writes "Microsoft originally targeted October 25th for Vista's release to manufacturing, but a last-minute bug that 'took most of the Vista team by surprise' has caused an unexpected delay, said Ethan Allen, a quality assurance lead at a Seattle high-tech company that tests its products for Vista. Allen said the Vista team discovered the bug, which 'would totally crash the system, requiring a complete reinstall'. Vista now has a new RTM date of November 8th" A reader wrote in to point out this story originated with Paul Thurrott.
That's what you get for hiring a furniture store for your quality assurance department.
Crap, now I have to wait another 2 weeks to not buy it.
A crash is one thing, but a re-install to fix it? I have my doubts, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Microsoft!
Gamers are going to spend their cash on Guitar Hero 2 instead.
That's a pretty nasty bug! That's almost as bad as a bug that could start your computer on fire, or punch you in the face.
I don't understand, they would pump this software out with the bug had someone not stumbled across it? Ew.
I, for one, welcome our new vista big overlords.
I, for one, sure as hell don't.
I'm sure all kinds of jokes about MS bug history will come up, but at least they caught it before it was officially released. Better a 2 week delay to fix the problem than them saying they will worry about it later in an update.
That said, this sounds like a fairly major bug to catch this late in the game.
[X] I am willing to help test Microsoft's New Operating System.
You can make a difference. Donate to The LEEBY (Larry Ellison's Even Bigger Yacht) Fund.
If you didn't actually need to re install vista after the crash, they probably would have went ahead with the date and patched it up later. But honestly, who really expected vista to not get delayed again.
its too bad they found it in time.. that would have made for a very good laugh.
I mean, we are talking Redmon, right???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I knew MS has poor QA... but a bug that requires a complete reinstall????
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
They discovered that the default start page in IE was http://www.linux.com/
-tgpo
That was my birthday... the 25th. Perhaps the delay was just a present for me :)
Vista: The OS so bad it tried to kill itself before release.
"Microsoft originally targeted October 25th for Vista's release to manufacturing, but a last-minute bug that 'took most of the Vista team by surprise' has caused an unexpected delay, said Ethan Allen, a quality assurance lead at a Seattle high-tech company that tests its products for Vista.
Reportedly, Bill Gates is resting easy with the knowledge that Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys are on the job.
Another member of Ethan Allen's team added "Give me Vista, or give me death". When Microsoft asked on what authority they could make such demands, Allen replied "In the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress". Off the record, he also retorted "Come out, you son of an XP hack, or I'll smoke you out!"
(in case you don't get it)
praise the lord for snapshot vms!
Why UNIX?
There's no telling how many OTHER bugs are still there, waiting to totally crash your system and force you to reinstall. We can make guesses (200? 500? 1000?) but nobody really knows.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Remember, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
So the ship date was pushed back to allow them to Enhance the Feature.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9004437
Why UNIX?
1) Vista has suffered from massive flaws, bugs, etc. ever since it was still called Longhorn.
2) Most of the IT community believes there's no chance Vista will be released on time.
3) Microsoft swears on its collective mothers' graves that Vista will be released on time.
4) Weeks before the scheduled release, a "massive and totally unexpected" bug forces the release to be postponed.
Smart money says that MS cooked up the bug to buy themselves an extra week or two of code/debug time. That money also says that in two weeks, they'll find another massive flaw, and so on...
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
It's only a matter of time before a similar bug is discovered. A similar bug, a dozen similar bugs. It will be after Vista is released. I do not believe that MS has spent enough time testing every facet of the new OS.
would have gone.
OTOH, is anyone suprised?
Are they selling overpriced couches now?
adventure-today.com
Its good they caught this. I'd hate to see Microsoft's reputation for delivering quality software on time be shot to ribbons by a bug riddled delivery.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Our company did last year, city of Vienna did, it should work out very nicely for you too. Our former XP users love KDE.
No need to put yourself through pains when you can improve security, save money and achieve a good deal of vendor independence all at the same time. Why support the Microsoft monopoly by paying ridiculous prices for bug ridden software with DRM restrictions, when you can run Free software on the industry standard (and thus inexpensive) hardware?
Knowing everything I know now, I only regret that we did not migrate to GNU/Linux sooner.
Once again, some Slashdot users prove that their hatred towards Microsoft surpasses objectivity. The article does not say how this bug occurs, how often or even why, so for all we know, this could be a very uncommon bug. It's just a good thing if the quality assurance team spots a bug and eliminates it, right? Why on earth should we flame them for that? As if the development of Linux was flawless?
I for one say, let's judge the final product before we smack Microsoft for something that's not yet released to the public.
Full Tilt
Oh yeah, that's the OS I want to base my Internet and personal business on. A total meltdown bug that takes most of the huge OS team by surprise on the day it's supposed to be manufactured ("in stone"), after all the testing is supposed to be complete. But it doesn't surprise everyone, so it's been known to some on the team - but slipped past testing anyway. Which causes a delay of only two weeks, despite the testing necessary to be sure this bug 1: is gone; 2: doesn't break anything else when fixed; and 3: doesn't have others like it waiting to "surprise most people".
What kind of $MULTIBILLION corporation, whose steady stream of "upgraded" products are essential to global business and billions of personal lives, runs this way?
Microsoft. When monopoly is all you need.
--
make install -not war
I say just leave it in and call it a feature.
That's my daughter's birthday? Is that a good thing, or a bad thing.
Just one??!!??
:q!
...like the energizer bunny: it keeps getting delayed, and delayed, and delayed...
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I suppose it isn't entirely as bad as I initially thought. They introduced a new bug on Oct. 13 and discovered/fixed it the following week. That isn't nearly as bad as having that bug be in there for months and then finally getting discovered near the end. Though I guess you can argue that any new code that has a potential to seriously cripple the system should not have been needed near release in the first place.
This will give Duke Nukem Forever more time to be finished.
This bug 'took most of the Vista team by surprise'. Well, gee-whillikers, I would hope so. If most of them _weren't_ surprised, I'd be even more dismayed.
Sigh.
Now, Steve Bink at bink.nu is a great guy and a friend, and I know he had no idea that these guys were just ripping me off. But that's the point of this: If you separate a story enough from its true source, it's becomes kind of unclear what the truth is.
Welcome to my life.
Poor Paul Thurrott! Such a hard life you lead. "I wrote about this first, I wrote about this first! digitimes didn't credit me! IDG credited digitimes, not me! I wrote about this first! bink linked to the IDG story, what about me!"
Paul Thurrott may be an important figure in the coverage of Microsoft Product or something, but I hardly think he's the only person with "sources" who get tipped off when these things happen. Maybe, just maybe, digitimes has sources too, and they found out about the setback from some place other than Paul Thurrott's site(s). Paul needs to get over himself, he's not the sole source of Microsoft news.
That, my friends, is what you get if you rely too much on automation and don't do enough manual poking around. For those who lack context, there's a strong push in Windows to do as much testing through automation as possible. As often happens when a $1M exec bonus depends on something, the underlings got a little overzealous and either fired software test engineers or "up-converted" them to "software development engineers in test" who were then told to write automation. The effect of this is that you have bits and pieces of Vista that are tested really well and other bits and pieces that aren't tested _at all_. One needs to remember that when your automated test case finds a bug and that bug gets fixed, it's not likely to find more bugs in the same code path. This doesn't mean there are no bugs in the code. This means there aren't more bugs _in this exact code path_ that test case exercises.
there are bugs severe enough that they require a complete install. Now that is scary.
Sorry, but the days of "reboot the machine" and "reinstall when you have a problem" should be over by now. I won't be investing in an operating system that, well, doesn't.
And yet this was precisely the sort of thing that was supposed to be eliminated with XP. I don't blame the team, i mean who wants to raise their hand the week before RTM and say that there's a rare but nevertheless catastrophic bug still lurking around?
I think for the next few months my advice to people is to buy a few copies of XP SP2. They'll be needing them for a few years yet.
And yes, i have tried Ubuntu. It looked like ass.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
that Steve Ballmer will go crazier than ever. Cause then, I 'll have to buy a copy to see what all the fuss is about! Yeah! Woooooooo!
flectere si nequeo superos, Achaeronta movebo
Is it just me or does this sound like testing for a disease or something? "Bad news. We got your blood tests back. You have Vista."
Microsoft doesn't ever surprise me. They live up to their reputation AS USUAL. Thank god for GNU/Linux. Windows is the biggest embarrassment ever to exist in the IT world.
I doubt you're going to find anyone on this site who hasn't heard of Linux. Some of us have to run Windows for work, some of us choose to run Windows (or OS X, or -gasp- both). In most cases, however, we're at least aware of our options, and capable of evaluating them regularly.
and -"x" day flaw?
"There's no telling how many OTHER bugs are still there, waiting to totally crash your system and force you to reinstall. We can make guesses (200? 500? 1000?) but nobody really knows."
"There's one bug, so there could be more bugs." Oooo... let me jot down that one alongside the writings of Confucius.
People are modding on autopilot now. Casting Microsoft in a negative light? MUST be insightful!
Authentium already broke Patch Guard and hooked the Vista kernel. That pretty much destroys 50% of the unbreakable new security model, as far as I can tell. Microsoft're quoted in that Reg story as saying they'll patch it, but are they holding RTM for that? If not, the launch will be as big a farce as the development process to date...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Has Microsoft cut and run on staying the course? Is Vista in it's last throes?
Say hello to my little sig.
http://www.mstechtoday.com/2006/10/17/importing-ph otos-from-camera-into-vista-sucks/
Or are they intent on making sure the first thing every Vista user does is grab a 3rd party tool for managing their photos instead of using Vista's built in tools?
I know Vista is offering a lot "under the hood" but beyond that every time I look at it I honestly think "They've had 5 years to development a new OS and this is all we get?". Vista may end up being a solid OS, and I'll definitely be using it at home, but I'm just not wowed by it in any way. I really did expect more.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I just got done trying to get Vista RC2 running on a spare hard drive, to get a "real machine" feel for the thing.
My experience -- It sucks.
1. The thing doesn't have support for my SATA controller. Gigabyte board, Ali SATA controller. I had to use the XP drivers. Tell me that Gigabyte/Ali are no name brands that no one's heard of. Not a deal breaker, as there's a work around.
2. Install is extremely slow. My personal idea is that every step along the way, the install is trying to find an IDE hard drive for some reason, but since I don't have one, I'm having to wait for timeouts. I'm not sure if this is the case, though.
3. Once you get in... My Geforce 3 can't handle Aero, so MS helpfully turned it off. The default theme is ugly as snot, with huge window borders (4-5 pixels), baby blue in color. Trying to change this baby blue color yielded no results; it stayed baby blue.
4. Getting used to the explorer shell again (I use Geoshell on my windows boxes) is a pain. What they've done to Explorer makes it less user friendly, instead of more user friendly. Granted, I don't use Explorer very often either (I use Directory Opus on my windows boxes), but even XP's Explorer is better/more usable.
5. The thing that made me finally throw my hands up in frustration. Somewhere in the 6 hours I had it running, I managed to completely lock myself out of Control Panel. Every time I'd try to go in there to get to something, it would crash. Whether I did it off the Start button, whether I did it from Explorer, it didn't matter... Explorer would crash. Another co-worker had this happen on a VM install of Vista, but he got around it by using MMC and manually adding in the plugins of whatever he wanted.
For RC2, this is a sad state. I remember, back in the day, happily running NT4 Beta 2 for months and months. Oh well.
At least not in the OS department:
= 5
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
Mac OS's market share is only 0.01% higher than it was in October 2005. If you take a look at how it has been fluctuating, you'll not think it to be too likely that it is bound to climb substantially higher in the near future.
This doesn't mean there are no bugs in the code. This means there aren't more bugs _in this exact code path_ that test case exercises.
There is such a thing as regression. The automation assures that bugs that were fixed in the codepath don't pop up again.
The effect of this is that you have bits and pieces of Vista that are tested really well and other bits and pieces that aren't tested _at all_.
I'm sure this is true for any sizeable software product, including MacOS X and Linux.
-Shippy
...but I honestly wish this bug wasn't caught.
e ", then where would that
Put the flame-thrower down, hear me out:
With all the Flap(TM) over Vista's licensing changes (*coff*ahem*'clarifications'*coff*) and
the "single reinstall/change...no! Wait! we meant up to 10! or maybe it goes up to 11, even!!11oneone",
I'm forced to wonder if this would be the best "acid test" for Vista's license.
If Vista allows for one "transfer/reinstall/leg-pulling-legalese-of-choic
have left people who got bit if it happened a second time before being patched/fixed?
I'd guess up shit's creek between a rock and a hard place getting paddled by Mr Bill and his pet Monkey-boy.
"Buy a new $400 copy" they'd say "But *your* bug..." we'd start to say "Is forcing you to buy a new copy"
they'd finish for us.
Yeah, ah well, but the Schadenfreud Lover in all of us would have *looooved* to watch the fireworks.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Does anybody else find it very concerning that:
1) The news of this delay came only 2 days before their supposed ship date.
2) They're STILL DEVELOPING THE SOFTWARE a week away from releasing it to the entire world!!
Maybe this is normal in smaller software development firms, but to me, it seems like they're being overly aggressive in getting the product out the door. This will likely become the most widely installed application on the face of the earth and yet they're still fixing (major) bugs a week before shipping?
They expect to have somthing like that fixed in 2 weeks ?
I guess we should expect customer service to be lightning fast when Vista finally does hit the market.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Even at Microsoft it isn't possible that a bug that requires a complete reinstall could remain undiscovered until the week before FCS. I don't doubt that there are thousands of bugs, many of them serious, but this just isn't plausible.
Are there any details on this bug?
What kind of problem could cause this serious destruction of the OS installation?
I'll guess it's registry corruption, since they rely on a single point of failure. Mess up one single entry, and the entire system is toast.
If it' file system corruption, that shows a serious lack of debugging effort. If the file system is this broken, how could you fail to notice it earlier?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Just starting out in software? Here's a tip - If your release date is affected by a single bug, your date is too close to the end of qa test. Your codebase should be untouched for a few days after QA before it can be declared suitable for consumption.
Glad I just switched to mac, even though it took a CompUSA store closing in Roswell, GA to get me to fork the cash out. Even a 30% discount was painful. Since then I've had two crashes caused by alpha software, but nothing from release quality stuff.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Before you start wearing your flame retardant suit all the time, you might want to see if anyone is playing with a flame thrower.
Consequently I think it would have been a horribly funny bug to release although I can't imagine that replacement discs wouldn't be to far down the production pipeline- After all I think Apple could use the competition.
Much Love, Ed
It's a feature, not a bug. This is how you know your Windows copy is genuine. If it doesn't crash requiring a re-install, it isn't genuine.
WTF are you on about? Do you have any experience in computer science at all? Because you're speaking utter rot.
Automated tests are better.
Automated tests can be run at night, when no one's around. They can be run constantly, without driving someone insane.
Automated tests are reproducible. Try following someone's 'Uh, I clicked here, then opened this, then I think I cancelled that program, then...' instructions a few times. Then tell me automated tests aren't preferable.
Can't keep up with all the tests to run? Buy a new computer. Your scheme would have a new person hired every time someone's maxed out. (Or, alternately, dumping old tests.)
Automated tests cover regressions. Found a bug? Write a test for it. Then if it pops up again (which they always do), you catch it early.
Automated tests can be run by anyone, if done properly.
Automated tests are predictable. They do, in fact, cover the same code each time. This is an asset, not a liability. You know exactly what you've tested, and what you haven't. You can write _more tests_ to cover the other stuff. You'd rather someone happen to click a little different on the last build, and miss a regression?
Manual testing is required for GUIs to some extent, and to winkle out usability issues.
To suggest MS is dumb because they tried to make their testing rigorous, predictable and regular is utterly absurd.
Though the bug was caught this late in the game it does appear to be, although minimally, that MS is trying to do the right thing for once.
One minor observation. MSFT cleared over 3 billion dollars LAST QUARTER! You'd think they could have taken a paltry 300 or 400 million of just that one quarter of profit and invested in the technical resources to get Vista out the door on time.
Ya think?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The tab I've got this article in says "Bug Pushes Vista Out..."
:)
Apparently the bugs have gotten tired of having MS slouching about all the time.
the sarcasm tags I'd wager?
You are aware that even XP will self-corrupt and be left unfixable? Even with System Restore etc? Your only recourse would be to restore from a backup in that case. (Yes, it happened to me)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Remember, remember the 8th of November...
The OS upgrade season and plot
I know of no reason
Why this Windows version should ever be bought
>when your automated test case finds a bug and that bug gets fixed, it's not likely to find more bugs in the same code path.
Depends on how well it's designed: the smart way to write an automated test is to have it generate (and log!) as many corner cases as it can come up with.
Vista is the downfall of computers..As we know it; some people might think that its just another 'you know...people felt this way about xp at first.' I do not agree with this theory. Sickens me really...
Is there a big, pent-up demand for a new Windows OS? I can't see myself paying for this for a very long time. And the only reason why I expect to get it eventually is because people buying new PC's will have it and will expect desktop support for that model for any software I develop. I will eventually be stuck with it. But is anyone really looking forward to it, and if so, how come?
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Vista has probably had the largest public beta testing in history.
Where did you get the idea that MS is relying on automation and not doing manual poking around? This bug likely occurs in extremely rare circumstances, which is why it was not discovered until now, despite the years of manual and automated in-house testing and millions of beta testers.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
What type of horrible coding can we expect if bugs that "totally crash the system, requiring a complete reinstall" are just now being found?
true, but they can only test the path the are scrptied for, where as a QA person can go "Hey, what happens if I mash the keyboard?" It is difficult, if not impossible, to script every contingency. At least with a person sitting there thinking about it while they test, they will come up with things someone just writing test scripts will not.
I think his point is that the almost SOLEY rely on automated tasting. If that is true, then they are making a mistake.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It is obvious that you have never worked in the QA department anywhere. Automated testing has its place. However in my +8 years of experience as a QA engineer after you're past Beta, automated tests will rarely find bugs.
The problem with automated testing is that it is "rigorous, predictable and regular". End users are NOT. If all users could be counted on doing the same thing the same way every time then automated testing would be all you need.
It's the QA engineer's job to take the testing past what a script can do. Let me give you a for instance
Let's say product P crashes if you do X, Y and Z, and your auto scrip finds this. So it gets fixed, and the scrip gets run, and voila, the bug is fixed.
A good tester will see that and explore the fix. Lets say the fix involved the way files are handled in memory. Well X, Y, and Z work now. But a good tester will think "what other parts of the program could be effected by a change in memory usage"? And then find a bug in A B or C that was introduced by the fix.
And yes, i have tried Ubuntu. It looked like ass.
Just for the records: Did you test as to whether it felt as such as well?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
...but the boot up graphics are nice.
Um..... Isn't that what code coverage is for? They know exactly what code paths are being exercised. Have you used VS Team Edition? Automated tests are the future and Microsoft has great tools for writing better unit tests. The problem is probably more likely to be that they haven't had time to cover _all_ their code with automated testing yet.
is it really necessary to include "bug" in the tags when you already have "vista", "microsoft", or "windows"?
mod me funny
C:\>DEL *.* /S /Y
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Had they not caught this, I'm not sure that Microsoft would be able to live it down for years. 'it just crashes.'
Then again, I'm not sure that would have mattered at all considering how flaky a lot of their previous releases have been and it didn't slow adoption down by much.
Good thing they found this minor issue in time! I'm sure if they are only finding small stuff now, I'm sure the final product will be bug free. With no major issues to ruin the day of the users.
"The knack of TaijiQuan is to throw yourself at the ground and miss (apologies to Douglas Adams)"
My taichi teachers say we should wait for the ground to come thru, and be elsewhere then.
--
make install -not war
It's not that you can't fix problems in windows if you've got the patience and skill, it's just that it's faster, more reliable, and generally better to simply reinstall everything.
Microsoft: Buy Vista Now!
World: Why should I?
Microsoft: Uh...because it's prettier and has DRM support?
World: No thanks, I'm happy with what I have now.
Microsoft: Please?
World: No.
Microsoft: Ballmer throws a chair in the new screensaver, and we dressed Gates up in a dress for the default background.
World: Really? Sign me up!
Microsoft: Really?
World: No.
(Months pass...)
Microsoft: WTS slightly used global software monopoly.
Google: 5 dollars and Gates in a diaper apologizing to the world.
Microsoft: Sold!
The parent post seems to be assuming that the bug has been in Vista for a long time. One possibility is that the bug is a major new bug created when a programmer attempted to fix an old minor bug. It happens now and then.
-------------------
Steve Stites
Your link doesn't seem to list any bugs requiring re installation.
Every OS has bugs. But there are bugs, and there are BUGS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, jan-feb-march is the best time of year for deals (speaking generally as a life long tight wad), you get marked down new stuff so the vendors avoid an additional ad valorem tax, and the pawn shops are slap full of deals as a lot of folks have gotten their credit cards bills from christmas binge buying and need to come up with some cash *quick*. So, new or used, it's a great time to shop then for most stuff.
Is anybody else as exhausted as I am resisting the urge to respond sarcastically to posts announcing MS bugs or delays? I want to be constructive but I do have my limits.
"would totally crash the system, requiring a complete reinstall"
;-) /me puts on his asbestos boxers and runs..
You mean they hadn't turned it on???
I'm not trolling here. I was interested in finding out who the Seattle company is and which of their 'products' brought down Vista. All I could find is that Allen is also connected to netfix.com which, at first glance' is just a 'I love MS' site.
Anyone know the rest of the story?
the new boss, same as the old boss.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
does that man-month deal apply to all code, or only closed source?
I'm not a dev, would like to hear from devs who have worked both on large projects.
Depends on the level of code churn and completeness of the unit tests. I've got regression suites that regularly catch major faults on the latest code branch. I'm sure you've heard the "well, it worked on my machine" mantra over and over in your time in the industry.
Vista will be about as popular, once released, as Windows ME. Microsoft can not shed its Windows legacy. They need to eithe a) re-do Windows the way Apple OS X was redone, b) open source it, or c) abandon it and move to another OS (Mac OS X, Linux) and stick to applications development only.
Yes, I know Windows is a cash cow. But since everyone hates it, why bother?
...... last-minute bug that 'took most of the Vista team by surprise'......
is that some of the Vista team knew about it!
I was chatting with some folks on the Vista team, and it turns out the bug is actually fairly interesting. Apparently the latest version of Windows Media Player infects the NT kernel with some DRM, and the only way to unlock them is to download your authorized user code from Microsoft.com... which unfortunately you can't do if you have a locked kernel.
Who woulda guessed?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
"Have to re-install"
That sounds like Windows Vista is based on Windows ME.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Can we assume that some of the Vista team were not surprised at all? And if they weren't: Should we be surprised to see more of these bugs in the near future...?
A few months back we were told on a Microsoft blog about numerous quality assurance tests that were COMPLETELY FLUNKED being marked "APPROVED" by the QA managers.
Any company who uses Vista as anything but a testbed until Service Pack 1 has to be completely out of their mind.
This thing will be THE biggest, buggiest and least secure OS Microsoft has ever turned out.
This thing has eighty million lines of code - TWICE that of Windows XP.
Does ANYBODY see where that extra forty million lines of code WENT? Do you SEE forty million lines of extra functionality in Vista over Windows XP?
I'll tell you where those forty million lines of code went - into bugs, security vulnerabilities, and bloat...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
They've been warning us. The doom is coming Nov.8.
Note the following:
"...a last-minute bug that 'took most of the Vista team by surprise'... said Ethan Allen, a quality assurance lead at a Seattle high-tech company that tests its products for Vista... would totally crash the system, requiring a complete reinstall..."
Allow me to rephrase. A critical show-stopper bug was found just before the release, by a third party. They got lucky. Just how long will their luck hold?
Vista Security: "Don't worry, be happy -- validation required."
Lavasoft has given its employees a two week vacation
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
They forgot the place the bug that kills itunes and the ipod process updater to corrupt the ipod file-system.
And they just wanted to delay it a bit so that they can be released during the ps3 upgrade week.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
... to withhold bad news until after the midterm elections!
I think you're missing the point.
Automated test cases are better than manual test cases, there's no question on that. If you plan to test it and can automate it, you should. The savings in regression time and the freedom to refactor code alone justify the extra time.
But the problem is that the mantra only applies to identically defined test cases that you want to execute. Ad-hoc testing is not something you can automate.
If you depend 100% on automation, you're throwing away ad-hoc testing, which can (and in my experience does) find a lot of the nasty bugs in a system, the ones that take you by surprise.
The reason is simple: if you capture a scenario with a well-defined test case, chances are both dev and test have thought through the scenario enough that the bugs are avoided, or catched very early. Having automation prevents new bugs from creeping in as well. But there are always scenarios that no one thought much about before, unexpected interactions between components, etc. and bugs tend to accumulate in those corners where they can survive.
IMHO, automation is a great thing, but it should always be complemented by some ad-hoc testing.
As you find the surprises through ad-hoc testing, you add new test cases to your automation to cover what was missed before, of course.
But to assume automation will capture everything is to assume perfection in the test cases and strategy, when the whole point of testing is that "bugs happen".
Code path is not the complete picture if a bug reproes on specific interactions between components.
Every code path may execute in some pass or antoher, but they may execute with the most trivial parameters, in the most common system state... which is the most likely case, since test cases would excercise the most common scenarios.
I haven't seen in typical IDEs the kind of tools that analyze coverage of the complete set of combinations of code-paths and reachable application states, but truth is I have not been looking into it recently. But I don't know how viable it is to depend on code coverage for something like an OS: it certainly matters, but I do not thinkeven 100% code coverage is not enough to say automation covers everything.
Did Microsoft actually discover a critical failure in the last moments before delivery, or is it tied to Rutkowska, as mentioned in another thread today?
As to "They had a lot of bugs in the past that were incredibly annoying but didn't force you to reinstall"...
A Microsoft Update for Win2K completely and utterly destroyed my primary development box shortly after WinXP had been released (I forget exactly how long.) 100% destruction -- I couldn't even recover the HDD without forensic tools.
While I'm glad they caught this one before release, I seriously doubt the testing was any more thorough this time than with previous releases of Windows. Sure, more people were running the betas, but they're all still from the same crowd: techies accessing pre-release technology who don't typically do the "creative" things that regular users do (e.g. pasting image files into text fields.)
That other article about an unsigned driver being injected worries me more. The OS hasn't even been released, and it's already got it's first virus bypassing purportedly "bulletproof" DRM. Just like the X-Box and every other attempt at DRM done to date.
DRM is a great concept for protecting the core OS and applications from infection, but it's rapidly becoming apparent the only thing it really does is provide an extra level of revenue protection for Microsoft by making it harder (for now) to pirate. What kind of testing was actually done such that Microsoft discovers a "critical bug"
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
No. That should read "In Soviet Russia, Ballmer chair reference IS INSERTED IN YOU!!" (And without anesthetic to boot.)
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
This particular bug, if it's the one that hit me when I happened to grab that particular build for an upgrade and that subseqently caused me to do a clean install of the OS and all apps, is one that is hard to catch with an automated test as it was purely a side effect that did not affect the (faulty) code path itself. With 50000+ regular work machines inside Microsoft running on Vista (and typically on rather young builds) it's also absurd to say that there is no manual testing going on.
Dear Vista Team,
No cake for you! Come back November 8th!
Love,
Firefox Team.
...they found the bug which is crashing windows ever since version 1!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I wonder how many other last-minute bugs in Vista won't be found before production? Sadly, nothing has changed over at Microsoft in all of these years.
For those of you with a short memory only: (attention, incomplete !)
MSDOS 3.0 - nonfunctional
MSDOS 3.3 - okay
MSDOS 4.x - nonfunctional
MSDOS 5.0 - okay
MSDOS 6.0 - nonfunctional
MSDOS 6.22 - okay
Windows 1.0 - nonfunctional
Windows 2.0 - nonfunctional
Windows 3.0 - just working
Windows 3.1 - okay
Windows 95 - barely functional
Windows 97 - okay (never released as such; but replaced Windows 95 from 1996 onwards)
Windows 98 - just working
Windows 98 SE - okay
Windows ME - just working
Windows 2K - okay
Windows XP - okay
Windows Vista - ??????
I know what to expect !
Wow. Could you link to the report at the bug tracker for this issue? Also, I'd be curious to know if it was in the stable or development branch (if it was recent, that would be Dapper vs Edgy), how close to the end of the development cycle it showed up, what package it was in, and how the darn thing happened.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is as opposed to what? A last-minute but that the entire Vista team expected?
And what does "most" mean here, anyway? Is that to say that there were some members of the team who weren't surprised by it? "Nah, I'm not surprised there's a crash bug in there. I was, like, totally stoned the day I coded that module."
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Nowhere in my post did I say "automation is bad". I did say that it must always be supplemented with a healthy dose of manual testing for scenarios not covered by automation. Saying otherwise would indicate that not only you didn't work in QA, but you also don't have (or don't communicate with) any decent QA engineers around.
Then, you're also forgetting that any decent rigorous test has maintenance costs associated with it. The higher the source tree churn, the higher the maintenance cost. You will basically have to change the test case every time developer changes the logic inside an API. This happens A LOT.
So automated tests aren't really a "fire and forget" thing that dreamers like you describe when they sell them to management. In a lot of cases automated tests make a heck of a lot of sense. I, for one, would want a heavy dose of atomation applied to every well specified API or web service, primarily because it's much easier to automate these tests than run test cases over and over manually. In a lot of other cases automation doesn't make any sense whatsoever and manual poking around by a qualified QA engineer (this is not limited to UI BTW, one can write tools that will allow to invoke APIs also) will uncover tons and tons more bugs and the bugs will be of much higher quality.
Definitely posted that in reply to the wrong thread, tabs be damned. Happy Halloween Anyway.