MS abolished manual testing (STE) positions prior to Windows Vista being released, somewhere around beta 2 or rc1. Vista probably suffered from this but Windows 7 didn't.
I was referring to both people doing manual testing and doing development of automated testing in the case of Microsoft.
My understanding (from the outside) is a that substantial number of people at Microsoft who worked in those areas were made redundant. From what I could gather the goal was to make the majority of testing automated and have the self test systems be developed by the developer of the respective subsystem themselves.
All of the weird regressions I've seen with Win 10 myself (and read about many people experiencing) matches that story.
My feeling is that with something as complex as a desktop OS that needs to work with the a) the history of Windows releases, b) the history of Windows apps, c) the entire, insanely big spectrum of PC hardware released the past 5-15 years or so you do need an army of relatively highly competent people willing to do lots and lots of manual testing over and over and over and over and over ... again. And of course lots of people to build automated systems.. but you can't really get away from the manual aspect very easily.
Did they have the STE title or SDET? When this happened it wasnt like there was 100% automation in place so developers, architects, SDETs, had to pick up the slack. I personally got stuck verifying bug fixes for our components (kernel stuff and supporting user mode services) in various languages I don't speak (particularly fun for left to right languages) just to get the bug count down. That team had something like 20 STEs that got the axe post beta 2.
