The pre-1.8 release less than a week ago had an obvious and crippling bug. An experience system was added, and when you died you dropped your experience. But instead of doing so as a single object, it made thousands of objects each holding one single XP point. This made the game completely unplayable if you were in the same area, and even crippled multiplayer servers for people not in the area.
Also, while that is the most recent glaring bug, in the past there have been multiple occasions where a release broke trees so that the leaves didn't decay after the trunk was removed. Punching down a tree is something you do in the first 30 seconds of a normal minecraft game.
I've reflected on this in the past as well. It seems to me Notch doesn't do any kind of automated testing what so ever. Some of the bugs would have been easy to discover with simple unit tests. The game is great and all, but he does seem to have a shoot-from-the-hip approach to development.
It was a pre-release. Also: leaves not decaying was the intended behavior at the time, it wasn’t a bug.
But that’s not really the point. There is no way to test Minecraft thoroughly if you are pretty much on your own. It has too many features. Minecraft is too complex for this method to work.
I disagree with this. Using my bot framework I actually began writing a test suite. I stopped because it wouldn't actually have been very helpful to what I was doing due to various reasons, but I progressed enough to know it was very doable.
Also, while that is the most recent glaring bug, in the past there have been multiple occasions where a release broke trees so that the leaves didn't decay after the trunk was removed. Punching down a tree is something you do in the first 30 seconds of a normal minecraft game.