Microsoft continues to release OOB updates to address the problems that occurred after the first Patch Tuesday of the year.
The company seems to be trying, but it also seems like something is not working right. There are many factors to consider in all this ongoing suffering for Windows users.
- Patch Tuesday causing problems is nothing new.
- Many of the issues that exist are not specific use cases that are difficult to test. In fact, most of them affect almost all supported versions of Windows.
- Finally, the latest release, along with the continued release of incomplete OOB (out-of-band) updates, reveals significant gaps in Microsoft's quality assurance (QA) process for Windows.
Although Microsoft has never said anything about it, there have been reports over the past decade that the company has significantly reduced its Windows testing and validation processes. It has laid off developers who worked on Windows QA, and generally uses Insiders to do the tests on the operating system.
Of course, anyone who has worked in IT in any way knows that end users can be a great source of feedback for beta software, but they cannot replace QA teams, who are paid to find bugs in the system and try to “break” the software.
Insiders don't see the backend code, can't write automated tests to check edge-cases, and certainly don't record or reproduce every bug they encounter. So the company shouldn't expect that.
Windows is used on hundreds of millions of devices around the world, and it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to validate the behavior of every setting. But the bugs we saw in recent Patch Tuesday updates affect everyone (IT administrators, enterprise customers, and consumers), and they revealed glaring gaps in Redmond's quality assurance (QA) process.
Maybe it's time for Microsoft to go back to the drawing board to see how they can make Windows more reliable, because the latest update proved that releasing beta software to Insiders isn't enough. There should be a dedicated quality assurance team responsible for checking compatibility (software and hardware) after every change. Then there should be some accountability for the state of Windows in general.
Of course, this is easier said than done.
But from the end user's perspective, there are many who are less interested in Copilot and more in a stable operating system.
The next Patch Tuesday update will be released on February 10. It remains to be seen what will happen this time.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
