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Bug Pushes Vista Out to November 8th

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the keep-the-ant-hill-under-glass dept.

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.

3 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing less would have delayed it. by Lostconfused · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Re-install? by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would guess its got something to do with the security and DRM authorisation side of things.
    It might not be as technically damaging as a filesystem bug, but with the DRM tied into everything if it fails the system will be left goosed.
    I remember the cryptographic service failing on Windows XP causing problems, but this was fixable because it wasn't at the core of the system.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  3. That, my friends, is what you get if you rely too by melted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.