1/ One of the hidden details in this article on Microsoft testing process is culture and politics. Over a decade ago when a bigger company bought my startup, they had to go through a similar culture/politics

2/ My company was lean/agile, with daily builds that went through a full automated unit/regression test that could release daily updates to customers. Their company was Microsofty waterfall development with a long period of manual testing as part of the release cycle.
3/ Culture change becomes political as people defend their jobs. The workers skilled at manual testing may lose their jobs in a shift to purely automated tests, as they may not have the skills necessary to build automated tests.
4/ It wasn't simply testing. Their update packages were inherently brittle, built in a way that was likely to fail. They were unwilling to make the architectural changes necessary to avoid the brittleness.
5/ They were therefore convinced a long period of manual testing was needed and it took years to move them off that principle.
6/ Google (including Chrome) has automated regression tests that complete in a day whereas Microsoft requires weeks of testing. Weeks of testing means bugs deliberately don't get fixed because of the risk it might introduce an even larger bug.
7/ With automated regression/unit testing measured in hours, it means you are free to keep fixing that bug multiple times until you get it right, and it only impacted the schedule by a few hours instead of a few months.
8/ We eventually got down to hourly builds and release packages that were less brittle, but it took a lot of political/cultural fights to get there. A lot of QA folks were never quite convinced in the value of automated tests.

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Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.