Purble Died

I have no idea what a Purble is.  Maybe the Cloud knows, as a Purble is a name of a game in Windows 7.  My discussion isn't about interface, style, or pretty graphics.  It is about code quality & what happens when testing isn't done.  Or you let the public test your stuff for you.  In this case Win7 choked on a Purble.  And died.

I'm a software test professional.  I've written lots of test plans, filed too many bugs to count and worked with code so fresh it had a new car smell.  And may not work past the splash screen.  For weeks.  So I've been around the block in testing software & systems.  I don't blanch when something that says Beta dies.

Last week MS offered up Win7 to those who wanted to give it whirl.  I pulled down the ISO to run on my Mac under VMWare's Fusion.  I was curious to see their take on the ever rising complexity of modern operating systems & push a few buttons.

The VM I set up has a real 2GB of RAM & one of the two fast cores of my machine, so Win7 was going to be a little starved for resources, but I wasn't looking for speed.  Just mess around (hence screen shot).  It boots pretty quick and uses soft high pitch tones to announce its arrival.  Ribbons as an interface theme is much different than OS X, so I stumbled around a bit as I don't have Vista the machines I use.  But stumbling around as a tester isn't a problem.  Until Purble died.

I can lock Win7 up by navigating through folders to where the included games hang out.  If I dive into the folder where the actual game executable is, the VM locks.  No blue screen, no nothing.  Locks.  No core dump, no watchdog to come along and give a stack trace.  Dead.

I can get it to happen every time.  I can run around in other folders fine.  I can play around with all kinds of settings in the control panel without causing a crash.  But touch a folder, dead.

So where are the test teams in this?  Has the system even gone through a set of regression scripts to give a view into the stability of the system?  Has anything been validated to work before sending it out to the public or is MS saving money by having the world file bugs to its latest OS?

I ask since moving around in folders is a common task within a file system.  If the OS has such basic issues, then it is not fit for the public to see.  If it is the VM that is locking and not the OS, then Win7 is trying to mess with things through the hardware abstraction layer that it shouldn't.  

Software quality is, to me, the always big elephant in the room.  Everyone talks about features.  But who cares about features if the backbone of the system is built on a foundation of sand.  Developers many times will push the Quality portion of the SDLC as far to the right as they can.  MS development managers have written some neat books on building in quality (the Excel team in the 1990's did some really cool stuff), do the OS folks read what the application folks have written?

Hopefully there will be a Build 8000 of Win7, for I'm curious as to what a Purble is.  For all I know on my system is they are dead.

-Mike M.