Quality Assurance Engineers don't have time machines

News flash.

Time machines only exist in the movies. Not real life.

Oh dear.

Thinking about this simple fact however will help you understand why software products and technology appear to “wear out”. Kind of strange no - I mean software isn’t like a physical object that can rust and yet as software ages it doesn’t work very well - your old iPhone gets less and less usable - mainly due to software (as well as the battery).

Is this “planned obsolescence”? An evil nefarious plot by the technology industry to keep us on an endless treadmill of buying new stuff?

As I like to say - never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence! Although the real issue is that when a technology device was made or a piece of software written how on earth could the quality team that tests it manage to test it with other software and devices in the future. Not possible since time machines don’t exist.

In fact quality assurance teams only have limited time and resources to test with a finite number of systems so mostly stuff gets tested with other technology which is current at the time it was produced.

So if you have a new piece of software - it’s probably best to run it on an server that is running an operating system that dates to the same time as that software. i.e. don’t go and install a 2030 release of Acme X software on a 2004 Windows Server edition.

Does that make sense?