If you are referring to taxi way lines, the answer is:
1. Change the code late in the game and
2. Have your Q/A person be out of the office and
3. Announce the beta date to create a clamoring chorus of “where’s the beta, where’s the beta”.
That is, the taxi lines were missing because we failed to follow our own process.
If you are referring to the taxiway PAVEMENT itself, that bug is MUCH harder to reproduce – I have one reproduction case (which required installing a large number of third party scenery packs) and it still only happens sometimes – you have to run the sim a bunch of times to see it. The bug isn’t visible at all on the core sim.

Overall I would say two things:
1. We’ve made pretty huge improvements in our test process compared to 24 months ago, but we’ve hit a wall in terms of improvement; and what we’ll need to do next is build significantly better automation, so we can just test -more- stuff automatically. So there’s some expensive behind-the-scenes infrastructure building that has to happen.

(This is one of those things that takes dev time, adds code change and risk to a release, and never makes the release notes. E.g. somewhere a while ago we built a complete interaction recorder/playback system into X-plane so that we could replay recorded tests of airplane flights as part of our regular test process.)

2. We need to integrate third party add-ons more heavily into that test process, to get better coverage of what X-Plane can do. 10.50 was one of the biggest -scenery system- updates we’ve had in a while, and a lot of the bugs are in cases that are exercised by third parties but not the default scenery. We’ve known this was a gap for a while and we’ve already been collecting third party aircraft (for example) but we need to combine this with automation to really get thorough coverage.

In an effort to better understand the beta process and not wishing to criticise in any way at all, how can something as vital/crucial as taxi ways be missed out? A genuine question. Thanks for all your hard work Ben.

Thanks

Is this a 1050-change really? Because a couple of months ago I left “AI flies your plane” on for about a day, and I was positively surprised when it took off from Helsinki, flew around Finland a couple of times, then headed to Sweden, Denmark, Germany … and finally crashed at some point over southern Germany after probably running out of fuel (taking by the amount of miles it managed to fly until that, I believe it was properly refilled at each stop).

But watching it fly on its own was actually a nice thing to have … quite unlike the “I’m a C172 taking off from Helsinki to Tokyo non-stop” – like if that is ever going to work out 😀

Stuff after the breaking bad slide in the conference talk is -not- going into X-Plane 10.

Please report bugs via the bug reporter.

It should be pretty solid.

based on first looks, that new interface is both visually more appealing, modern and looks to save a lot of time, great choice