Steven Sinofsky, the Senior Vice President for the Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, in an attempt to quell a beta tester rebellion over a perceived lack of feedback concerning bug reporting has made an astonishing confession: Windows 7 has at least 2000 bugs.
Sinofsky states that more than a million people installed and used the Windows 7 beta in the first few weeks of release, and admits it has been a lot of work coping with the feedback. How much work?
How about one feedback report every 15 seconds during one week in January, and a total of more than half a million such reports so far. Sinofsky explains that this equates to more than 500 feedback reports for every Windows 7 developer to deal with, and that only 6 weeks into the testing process.
With more than 10 million device installations for the Windows 7 beta I guess that bugs were inevitable, that is he point of testing after all. Although Microsoft is not saying how many bugs have been reported and verified, Sinofsky is happy to reveal that it has the "fixes in the pipeline for the highest percentage of those reported bugs than in any previous Windows development cycle."
Which is good news, especially when you consider that those fixes concern around 2000 reported crash causing bugs in the Windows 7 code alone, not including third party driver or application problems.
Sinofsky also explains what a bug is, as far as Microsoft is concerned: "a bug is any time the software does something that someone one wasn’t expecting it to do. A bug can be a cosmetic issue, a consistency issue, a crash, a hang, a failure to succeed, a confusing user experience, a compatibility issue, a missing feature, or any one of dozens of different ways that the software can behave in a way that isn’t expected."
Fair play to Microsoft and Steven Sinofsky for having the balls to reveal that 2000 bugs figure, I am sure it will draw plenty of flack from the usual suspects. However, the fact that these are being dealt with and fixed show that the beta testing process is working. The fact that Microsoft are telling us show that it is getting a grip on the hearts and minds issue. For once, I'm on the side of the Microsofties.
