Asobo / Microsoft - I mean this with all due respect, but I was very, very disappointed with your announcement of having a sign up for 300 people to help test WU4, for numerous reasons.
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it’s way, WAY too late to start testing World Update 4. WU4 should be done at this point - it should be in “final polishing”. There is simply no way 2 weeks is enough time to accomplish anything. These people should already be starting to test for WU5, not WU4.
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I’m very disappointed that you’re opening this to a “random pool of testers”. You should already have TONS of data form the Alpha on a) who were testers that found multiple bugs across multiple systems, b) who bothered to write detailed bug reports, c) who has hardware / addons that represent a wide cross section of the population and d) who are real world pilots with real experience (sorry, you need to be focusing on actual pilots at this point). Throwing this data away and starting with a new pool seems like a really, really poor decision. Not “data driven” like Microsoft purports to be helping customers move to.
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I’m SUPER concerned that if you think 2 weeks of testing prior to final release is acceptable then you’ve been brainwashed into thinking Agile methodologies work on huge, complicated projects like this. THEY DON’T. Might explain a lot about the major issues you’ve run into though.
Long and short, this seems more like a publicity stunt and “covering your butts” than an actual attempt to make things better. What’s going to happen - people are going to sign up tomorrow, start finding major bugs the day after tomorrow (if not sooner), and then what? You don’t have time to fix them in the 2 weeks until release.
These people honestly should be starting to test WU5 at this point. You have started on that already, right? Right?
I do (honestly) think this is a move in the right direction, but trying to do this now for WU4 implies things behind the scene that have me very worried.
Final question / comment - are you using automated testing procedures? You should be automating as much testing as possible. A computer can absolutely be programmed to take off , fly around for a few hours, and verify there aren’t memory leaks and/or performance issues compared to prior releases. I’m sure there’s ton of other automated testing that could be accomplished also. Betas should only be released to your beta teams AFTER it’s gone through basic, automated testing.
Again, I mean this with all due respect. I really, really want MSFS to be everything it can be. But the poor track records on having major bugs during releases, seeing you recruiting for testers 2 weeks before a major release, and the glacial pace of fixing bugs that have been present for well over a year is starting to make me really cynical that this isn’t ever going to get there.
Scott