Comment by ffsm8
I can totally see how letting go the dedicated QA roles increased the amount of bugs that ship to customers, but
> Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc
Seems incorrect from all interactions I've had with dedicated QA to day.
They usually have no idea about any of that, what they do know is how to use a software and what scenarios have previously broken, but not from a technical perspective that can reason about error scenarios. More like a power user that just learned to use a UI, without knowing what it actually does.
I feel like their recent push to AI driven development has likely had more impact in their issues in the last 2 yrs vs a decision that's at this point 11 years in the past - but they are probably both (along with other unnamed factors) contributing to this end result.
Overall saddening, as windows 10 really was a big leap forward in usability.
Microsoft's Software Development Engineer in Test position was different than the "power user QA" archetype you describe and is common.
These positions required development abilities and they would develop the testing scenarios concurrently with the team building the software. And the results were less buggy, IMHO. But it's expensiving having twice the engineering staff when you can just ask software developers to test things themselves and not follow up to make sure it happened.