James Whitaker post on MS Testing - My Opinion
I was reading the post on “if Microsoft is so good at testing, why does your software suck?” Written by James Whitaker.
I think that his observation is missing a very impotent aspects.
I totally agree that Microsoft is under the microscope at all times and there are many users that are using Microsoft's products and I also agree that the products are very complex but in my opinion testing and in the wider picture QA are science and by doing it right you can bring the quality of products no matter what their size and complexity is to very high level.I also disagree that the quality of Microsoft's products is low, I think that Microsoft is doing a great job in bringing high quality products to the market taking in account one parameter that has the biggest influence on their product and that is marketing constraints (For example Windows Vista).The problem in marketing constraints is mostly the time limits to get the product to market, Microsoft and any other company that do a correct QA process checks each bug to see if it will be fixed and when, some of the bugs will be never fixed because of time limits and resources so what a customer is seeing as a problem in the product (Not necessarily Microsoft) in most cases it is just a bug that the company decided not to fix (Assuming they are doing a correct QA).
I like to clarify that this is not always the case but if a company is doing a QA process in a scientific approach means they work with QA methodologies and they use enough resources most chances they already know about the bugs customers find.
"Time to market" in most cases is the biggest enemy of the QA because the QA department should put the stamp of quality at the end of the development cycle, the QA process starts at the beginning of each project and is being performed during the AL (Application Lifecycle) but it always left with the final testing at the end of the cycle and gets all the pressure from the marketing.
Has I mentioned in this short post although James Whitaker did a grate job describing Microsoft's problems with the quality of there products he omitted one impotent reason: "Time to Market".