Why do Software Updates Often Cause so Many New Issues?

[Boomwebsearch]

Hi LinusTechTips Community,

 

I am wondering why software updates often cause new problems that did not exist before, I am especially talking about Windows 10 updates and McAfee Total Security updates. For example, with a Windows update my search index was broken and recently with a long McAfee update, the notifications button is broken and continuously loads when you click it (even let it load for over 10 minutes and still loads) that makes it difficult to monitor scans running and pause/stop them if needed.

 

 

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions,

 

@Boomwebsearch

[Eighjan]

Simply put - customisation.

Whatever you tweaked in the first place may (but not always) need to be re-tweaked back to the way it was, before the update.

[minibois]

2 minutes ago, Boomwebsearch said:

I am wondering why software updates often cause new problems that did not exist before, I am especially talking about Windows 10 updates and McAfee Total Security updates.

These programs are so large, the developers often do not have the team to be able to test everything.

Luckily there is something called "Unit tests" and "Integration tests". The former are small test of a specific part of a program, while the latter - as the name suggests - tries to test the inner-workings between different parts of the program.

Sadly though, often times not eeeevery use case is properly tested in these tests, which could mean certain things do not work in a new release.

 

Another part is that - at least with Windows - users are slowly becoming (beta) testers. In the past Microsoft had a whole bunch of computers running tests of the OS, but nowadays they rely on trickling down the updates. So group 1 gets it before group 2.. etc. So if any group encounters an issue, they will report it (hopefully) and thus the release won't go further to another group.

But of course not all use cases will be covered here, so there will be a lot of variance.

 

TL;DR: testing software through automatic or manual means is haaaaaard.

[Boomwebsearch]

35 minutes ago, Eighjan said:

Simply put - customisation.

Whatever you tweaked in the first place may (but not always) need to be re-tweaked back to the way it was, before the update.

 

It's not necessarily that the update gets rid of any customizations applied, it's more that certain features don't work that doesn't have anything to do with custom settings (by default it should work, unless they designed it to be broken). Although, usually any customizations will get transferred over.