> so you can find out if how much effort it's worth putting into validating it as a platform.
I don't understand the logic here. We're talking about the new version of your target OS. You will presumably always need to support it eventually.
IMO if you're large enough to have a testing and validation process at all, you should be including at least the public beta builds in those tests.. By the time it hits RTM if you don't at least know if your software works you're doing it wrong.
Also, if your software is regularly breaking with OS releases and you're not doing something that requires you to be deep in the internals, you're almost certainly doing something significantly wrong and should figure out what that is. The only software I consistently experience breakage with on updates is also the one where their tech support insists that we're being paranoid for refusing to give their users local admin privileges just to run it. I don't think for a second that's a coincidence.
> I don't understand the logic here. We're talking about the new version of your target OS. You will presumably always need to support it eventually.
Maybe not, you might be able to skip a version that had poor adoption. Windows ME, Windows Vista, IE7 and TLS 1.1 never had a very high market share, because people put off updating so long that better things came along.
It’s nice to be able to choose schedules and prioritize work based on metrics. There’s also the fact that you could e.g. drop support for Windows 8.0 if you find out that only 0.1% of your users were using it.
I don't understand the logic here. We're talking about the new version of your target OS. You will presumably always need to support it eventually.
IMO if you're large enough to have a testing and validation process at all, you should be including at least the public beta builds in those tests.. By the time it hits RTM if you don't at least know if your software works you're doing it wrong.
Also, if your software is regularly breaking with OS releases and you're not doing something that requires you to be deep in the internals, you're almost certainly doing something significantly wrong and should figure out what that is. The only software I consistently experience breakage with on updates is also the one where their tech support insists that we're being paranoid for refusing to give their users local admin privileges just to run it. I don't think for a second that's a coincidence.