Windows 10: Former Microsoft Employee explains why bugs in Windows updates increased

Has the number of bugs in Windows updates increased in the past couple of years? If so, what is the reason for the increase in bugs? That's the question that former Microsoft Senior SDET Jerry Berg, better known as Barnacules, answered in a recent video.

Berg worked for 15 years at Microsoft and one of his roles was to design and develop tools and processes to automate testing for the Microsoft Windows operating system. He left the company after Windows 8.1 shipped to the public.

Microsoft changed testing processes significantly in the past couple of years. Berg describes how testing was done in the late 2014 early 2015 period and how Microsoft's testing processes changed since then.


Back in 2014/2015, Microsoft employed an entire team that was dedicated to testing the operating system, builds, updates, drivers, and other code. The team consisted of multiple groups that would run tests and discuss bugs and issues in daily meetings. Tests were conducted manually by the team and through automated testing, and if tests were passed, would give the okay to integrate the code into Windows.



The teams ran the tests on "real" hardware in a lab through automated testing. The machines had different hardware components, e.g. processors, hard drives, video and sound cards, and other components to cover a wide range of system configurations, and this meant that bugs that affected only certain hardware components or configurations were detected in the process.

Microsoft laid off almost the entire Windows Test team as it moved the focus from three different systems -- Windows, Windows Mobile and Xbox -- to a single system. The company moved most of the testing to virtual machines and this meant according to Berg that tests were no longer conducted on real and diverse hardware configurations for the most part.

Microsoft employees could self-host Windows which would mean that their machines would also be used for testing purposes. The main idea behind that was to get feedback from Microsoft employees when they encountered issues that they encountered during work days. Berg notes that self-hosting is not as widely used anymore as it was before.

The main sources of testing data, apart from the automated test systems that are in place, comes from Telemetry and Windows Insiders. Windows Insider builds are installed on millions of devices and Microsoft collects Telemetry from all of these devices.

If something crashes, Microsoft gets information about it. One of the issues associated with the collecting of Telemetry is that most bugs are not caught by it. If something does not work right, Microsoft may not be able to discern the relevant bits from Telemetry data. While it is in theory possible that users report issues, many don't and at other times, issues may go under because of other feedback that Microsoft gets from Insiders. Additionally, while Insiders may report bugs, it is often the case that necessary information is not supplied to Microsoft which poses huge issues for the engineers tasked with resolving these issues.

Tip: you can view the Telemetry data that Microsoft collects. Also useful: find out how to configure Telemetry on Windows 10.

Back in 2014/2015, Microsoft's Testing team would be tasked with analyzing bugs and issues, and supplying engineers with the data they required to resolve these. Nowadays, Berg notes, it is Telemetry that the engineers look at to figure out how to fix these issues and fixes are then pushed to customer devices running Insider Builds again to see if the issue got fixed or if it created new bugs.

One of the main reasons why Microsoft stopped pushing out new feature updates to everyone at once was that issues that were not detected by the processed could potentially affect a large number of customers.

To avoid total disasters like the Windows 10 version 1809 launch, gradual rollouts were introduced that would prevent feature updates from being delivered via Windows Update to the majority of machines in the early days of the release.

Closing Words


Microsoft exchanged the in-house Testing team with Telemetry data that it gathers from Insider Builds that it pushes to consumer and business devices, and replaced much of the PCs that it used for testing with virtual environments.

All of that led to an increased number of issues and bugs that customers face on production machines when installing Windows updates or feature updates. (via WinFuture)

Now You: What is your take on Microsoft's approach? What needs to change?

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Microsoft "Find a bug"

To help incent its own employees to file and fix bugs in Windows Vista, the Microsoft brass is implementing a bounty program, according to one employee. The Windows team will pay employees $100 for each bug file and fixed. And the employee with the most bugs filed and fixed will earn an extra $500.

Source: Microsoft Watch

 

Microsoft Announces the Windows Bounty Program

While Microsoft has been offering bug bounty incentives since at least 2012, Google has arguably been much more vocal in its bug bounty programs. The company recently increased the maximum payout in its bug bounty programs (mainly focused on Android) to a staggering $200,000, and now Microsoft is not only following suit - it's upping the game.

With the Windows Bounty Program, which Microsoft announced yesterday, the company is looking towards an increased incentive to security-hardening suggestions from tech-savvy users. This program will extend to all features of the Windows Insider Preview in addition to focus areas in Hyper-V, Mitigation bypass, Windows Defender Application Guard, and Microsoft Edge. And incentives starting at $500 and going all the way up to $250,000 are very, very respectful.





Source: Blogs.Technet @ Microsoft

 

Microsoft Botches Up UEFI Support for Windows 7 on ASUS Motherboards



Microsoft suggests updating to Windows 10 to patch Windows 7

• 
  
  
• Chris Merriman
• 
  @ChrisTheDJ
• 05 May 2016

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MICROSOFT HAS confirmed a potentially lappy-borking problem that it won't be fixing, because Windows 7.

Woody Leonhard, the respected Windows columnist, points to a problem involving Asus motherboards, which also appear rebadged in a variety of other manufacturers' machines, and the activation of UEFI Secure Boot for Windows 7 in a patch KB3133977.

Short version: install update, welcome to Borksville, population you.

Both Asus and Microsoft acknowledged the problem. Microsoft entitled the article "BitLocker can't encrypt drives because of service crashes in svchost.exe process in Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2", but we prefer to just call it "Trevor for brevity."

The firm's advice was that it's an optional update, leave well alone, you'll be fine, or alternatively turn secure boot off.

Then Microsoft did a silly, silly thing.

It moved the update from 'optional' to 'recommended' and anyone who reads this site regularly will know what happens when Microsoft does this. That's right boys and girls - it makes it automatically install, unless you've specifically told your machine not to.

So now, if you have one of the affected motherboard and you keep your security updates automatic like wot Microsoft recommends, then your machine will stop working properly.

We should add it's not permanently bricked, but it will take some mucking about in the BIOS to fix and that's a pain even for an experienced computer user.

Microsoft has, by offering a workaround, suggested heavily that it won't be fixing the problem, though we have asked the question, so expect a response in about a fortnight.

But the real kicker is this piece of advice: "Note The Secure Boot feature is supported in Windows 10. To learn more about the security advantages of this feature and about the upgrade path from Windows 7 to Windows 10, go to the following Windows website"

Holy toledo, this company really knows how to rub people up the wrong way.

After all - if the advice is to manually avoid the update or move to a version of the operating system where there's virtually no control over updates, then Microsoft is dealing in massive contradictions.

A more cynical site would suggest that it's yet another example of Microsoft running Windows 7 into the ground and adding built in obsolescence to encourage quicker updates. But we're not that sort of site.

Its the patching to force secure boot that is the problem win 7 does not support secure boot
hence it borks systems and well microsofts answer is Cactus >your Asshole > insert

from the inquirer