Microsoft gets "agile"?

[Thorin]

This gives an interesting insight into what was the prevailing culture at Microsoft.  Sounds like they've started embracing automated testing.  I like the idea of bug jail, where a developer who writes crappy code is stopped from writing more code until its fixed.



It's eerie how close this came to describing where I used to work...

[Darren Dirt]

Nice find!



WOW. Unbelievable. Truth is stranger and sadder than fiction:

Mr. Allchin signed on to the plan and broke the news to Messrs. Gates and Ballmer. Mr. Allchin remembers that Mr. Gates pushed him to keep going with the original version of Longhorn, saying if the software writers needed more time Microsoft could ship a scaled-down version in the interim. <-- uh, yeah, more "time", that's what we really need... work harder, not smarter, uh, sure



Over the next few weeks, Mr. Gates expressed frustration. At one meeting on Aug. 17, he berated Longhorn engineers for the mess, say people familiar with the meeting. (Mr. Gates says he doesn't remember it.) <-- sounding a bit like a long-in-the-tooth politician, ain't he?



It could take years before Windows can be as flexible as Microsoft needs it to be to pump out new features quickly. But the cultural shift is in swing. Hours after showing off Windows Vista to software makers this month, Mr. Gates in an interview noted how Microsoft's Office group is now using some of Mr. Srivastava's tools to improve its code. "It's amazing the invention those guys have brought forward," he said. "I wish we'd done it earlier." <-- So do we, Billy. So do we.  :evil:

PS: this was really interesting:

In 2001 Microsoft made a documentary film celebrating the creation of Windows XP, which remains the latest full update of Windows. When Mr. Allchin previewed the film, it confirmed some of his misgivings about the Windows culture. He saw the eleventh-hour heroics needed to finish the product and get it to customers. Mr. Allchin ordered the film to be burned.

Okay how soon before iFilm etc. have a rip of this film? Seriously, it's gotta be floating around somewhere... Reminds me of a book** I own, that was written by a guy observing over a year the creation of a Microsoft product (some multimedia thingie eventually called "Explorapedia") that ended up barely even getting completed -- but the book has his commentary and analysis peppered throughout that expresses shock and disgust at how chaotic and inefficient and SLOPPY the development environment is at M$... I guess finally Gates is acknowledging it (only like 10 years later )



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**I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier (1996)

(see also Amazon Customer Reviews)