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How Microsoft Develops Its Software
crem_d_genes writes "David Gristwood has a post on his blog that notes '21 Rules of Thumb - How Microsoft Develops Its Software', on which he will elaborate at TechEd in Amsterdam next week. It was derived from interviews with Jim Mccarthy, also of Microsoft. Gristwood: 'As someone who has been involved with software development for over two decades, the whole area of how you actually bring together a team and get them to successfully deliver a project on time, is one worthy of a lot of attention, if only because it is so hard to do. Even before I joined Microsoft, ten years ago, I was interested in this topic, having been involved myself in a couple of projects that, I shall politely say, were somewhat less than successful.' Tips include such features as 'Don't know what you don't know.'; 'Beware the guy in a room.'; 'Never trade a bad date for an equally bad date.'; and 'Enrapture the customers.'"
While Microsoft doesn't consistently put out the best products they're capable of, I don't think anyone would stoop so low as to say they put out the WORST product out in the market. As such, it's worth considering how they go about making their software, since it's a difficult job, at best, to get a group of developers to deliver anything. Any tips we can take away as a collective whole would be helpful to us in our larger goals.
Yep, Microsoft double-speak in action. Here's another great example, "Zero defects does not mean that the product does not have bugs" Well, to the rest of the world it bloody well does!
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
the whole area of how you actually bring together a team and get them to successfully deliver a project on time, is one worthy of a lot of attention, if only because it is so hard to do
Not being funny, but can somebody point out the last time Microsoft actually brough a team together and managed to deliver a project on time. Every major OS release, every service pack, every single project they have ever produced seems to have been delayed. They are the antithesis of "release early, release often" but then they having paying customers as opposed to us guys...
Anyway, call my cynical, but I think I can find better sources on how to program than the Microsoft team.
The "rest of the world" has no clue about the nature of software. That quote is absolutely correct.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
How Microsoft develops software:
(1) They notice a great software idea by another company.
(2) They ignore it.
(3) They realize it's big.
(4) They copy it.
(5) They "bundle" this software in the next version of Windows.
(6) They eliminate the competition using their desktop monopoly.
Number (5) can be substituted by "They buy the company".
Microsoft doesn't develop software, they copy or buy.
When was the last time that a certain game company released their software on time? Or for that matter, a lot of game companies these days?
Hmmm.
Um, crap. 'Zero Defects' means 'Zero Defects'. If you mean, 'An acceptably small number of defects', then just say so. I still say it's Microsoft double-speak.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
I think Linus has proven the effectiveness of that one, and Eric S. Raymond happens to agree with me ;)
Too bad you have to go AC just to say something good about Microsoft!
You certainly bring up a good point, though - there's a fine balance before working on a product until it's completely flawless (by which time it will be obsolete), or rushing a product that solves today's problems to market before it's completely bug-free. Corporations, naturally, have strong motivation to getting the product out quickly, so as to take advantage of market opportunities.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
#12 claims bluntly that supporting something becomes so much easier when you only have to support it on one platform. From one perspective there's a certain truth to that, and from another perspective it's laziness. But contrast it with #20.
#20 says that the idea has to be shared as completely as possible between everybody in order for everybody to help out as best they can to making the idea a reality.
"Things become easier to support and test if they follow certain specific guidelines, and with a common implementation, everybody can follow a given idea better." Sure, it looks good on paper, and it makes a fine creed for developers, but with Microsoft, that's where it comes to a screeching halt. Because out in the real world:
Hey, nice standard! Mind if we grab it away from you and run this way with it?
It's both weird and wrong seeing people in Microsoft talking about ideas and commonality of vision when in practice the company as a whole so copiously defecates (both buttocks blazing, as it were) on any standards that they don't already have a headlock on.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Yes, but that "problem" is generally just the previous release :D
1. Don't know what you don't know.
Yes, and I would also add that feigning ignorance is much safer than feigning self-confidence, and it helps projects to thouroughly research information that is even considered known.
2. Get to a known state and stay there.
I disagree. I think we should accept that we are only ever in a state of the unknown, so that we may prepare for the worse. Don't stay in a state of the known, because then you are ripe for the unknown to come up and bite you on the ass.
3. Remember the triangle.
Resources, features and the schedule are indeed important, but I would also add that there are core features that must be adhered to in order to prevent disasters, which are not features, but critical systems. Sometimes companies like Microsoft will push for more and more features, when a much simpler system will work better and have stronger core competencies.
4. Don't go dark.
I would have to agree with this, but it could also be identified as avoiding feature creep by keeping it simple-stupid. Microsoft adds too many features that require a plethora of miniscule details in order to work, and that often throw off stability of the rest of the system in doing so. Going dark in some areas is going to happen, so I would put that you should go dark wisely, by accepting that at times in the project the team will be in a state of the unknown. Ensure that core competencies are structured correctly to accomodate individual feature additions without delays or growing instabilities. What it comes down to is smart planning and a lot of foresight, but even less features, but enough to get the job done.
5. Use zero defect (ZD) milestones.
I disagree. I think every milestone has to be understood completely for what it is, but it's got to be bug free or it's a fail, in my books. And you should understand the milestone failures along the way because that's part of team building. If you code up a module as one of your milestones and it has a few bugs, you have to track down why they are there and set that as a new milestone -- not skip to the next official milestone.
6. Beware of a guy in a room.
Read Donald Trump's book, How to Get Rich (2004). There is a part in there when Trump talks about a guy who is constantly late all the time, who isn't speaking with employees, and isn't working as a team member properly. Some employees start complaining, and Trump informs them to ask the guy if he needs his laundry picked up or a coffee or lunch brought to him. Trump reminds them that the guy started acting this way just a few months before a multi-million dollar idea was worked out, alone in his office. He says that whenever the guy acts like this, he's about to shake the company. You have to accomodate programmers like this too, and to do so, you can't be looking over their shoulder all the time. I think you should not beware of a guy in a room, but you should change your schedule to accomodate them, and ask for updates from time to time. You have to trust your people or it won't work.
7. Never trade a bad date for an equally bad date
I would agree with this, but if possible you should follow the Id Software motto, when it's done, instead, because only then will you reach the zenith of design and programming practice. Just don't take it too far like some of the other companies with games due out in the late/mid nineties that we're still waiting/not-waiting for.
8. When slipping, don't fall.
Duh.
9. Low tech is good.
Only if you're at Microsoft, because that's all you've got. *zing!* Seriously... the guy says, "A smaller effort is almost always more desirable than a larger one." Can I just say that it reminds me of the commercial with the underachievers? It hinges on putting forth a paced effort, not a minimal output. Sometimes you have to do some work.
10. Design time at design time.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Wow, your use of the language is almost as much fun as Microsoft's. Bugs, defects, software issues?
That's what I said. The article's intended audience is professional developers and software engineers, which evidently does not include you.
That means every piece of software has an infinite number of bugs, by your definition.
Oh, nonsense. Software would have to have infinite complexity to have an infinite number of bugs. Now you're just blowing smoke.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Those people are good when they turn out wonderful code that works. But there exists the possibility that sometimes people like that will not turn out something that works. Or they will turn out something that works much later than planned. Locksing yourself in a room and not communicating doesn't make you a genius. And in a large project with tons of interdependancies you need to discover slips sooner rather than later.
To use your example, what if this guy hadn't finished his code on time so it wasn't ready for the planned launch window? It's great that it worked out but many companies can't risk the possibility that it won't.
Huh? He's arguing against solitary development and for "They must be capable of performing on a team, making their work visible in modest increments and subjecting it to scrutiny as it matures." and you're invoking Linus as an argument against him?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Once upon a time, I worked for a hardware company, where I started in their support call center. One of the first things I was told is to never use the word "problem" and instead use the word "issue."
Why? This is what the idiot trainer had to say:
"Problems have to be fixed, where issues get resolved."
It's complete marketing bullshit, and we all knew it, so we would constantly be saying smartassed things like "This caller is causing me issues" and "what the hell is your issue, buddy?" and in the IRC server we had set up for in-call chats, the standard thing went like this:
tech1: MainstreamVidCard is giving a black screen with an hourglass and locking up... wth?
tech2: that card sucks. Tell them to get the übercard.
tech3: LOL
TeamLead1: Try new video BIOS and drivers. Go through BIOS settings, and tell them to stop overclocking.
tech2: LOL
tech3: LOL overclocking
tech1: ok thx!
TeamLead1: NI.
We couldn't say No Problem, so we said No Issue instead. What a farce.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That only works for free software.
Release early - ie; when you KNOW it's unfinished.
Relase often - ie; it's so full of bugs and unfinished you need nightly builds to work them all out. At this point, you're releasing forever because now you have yourself a moving target with no set "completion" point, or any goal you're trying to achieve.
Listen to your customers - And if they complain just say "well it's free so fuck you if you dont like it". Seriously, no OSS projects "listen" to the customers.
If they did "listen", Linux wouldn't be a monolithic kernel, so I could download binary drivers for my new video card without recompiling it. Guess what, nVidia or ATi are never going to want to open their drivers' source. Doing so would essentially give away all the IP they put into designing their GPUs. A month later, some fab is set up in taiwan producing Radeon clones.
Samba would be able to function as an Active Directory Controller - it can't, and it's not even a project goal, NT4-style is apparently good enough, they haven't even plugged the gaping security holes in the old scheme MS did. Ie; you have to disable "require sign or seal" to join 2k or XP to a samba domain, essentially, you don't give a rats ass about verifying the authenticity of the MD4 password hashes that get bandied about plaintext on the network.
Open source "works", but not all of the time, and not always how you want it to.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Wow, the Mozilla developers could really learn something from Microsoft here. Maybe they should contact MS and ask how they can switch from a build environment that supports 10(*) or more platforms to one that just supports Win32.
While they're at it, maybe the IE core team can help them out with how to introduce Mozilla features that allow arbitrary, hidden software to be easily and automatically installed on the user's machine.
(*) Technically, I suppose the Mozilla team builds for 3 platforms (Win32, OS X, and Linux) which does probably limit the amount of QA testing required, but this is still usually 3x as many as the Microsoft people deal with, and the build system enables at least 7 more platforms on top of that.
-- Fratz, human
12. Portability is for canoes.
And system software. Even discounting the added development burden, with the addition of each additional platform the job of QA increases substantially. While clever QA management can minimize the burden somewhat, the complexity of multi-platform support is beyond the reach of most development organizations. Place your bets. Demand multi-platform support from your system software vendor, then build your product on the absolute fewest number of platforms possible.
Wow...yeah, that's Microsoft alright. Don't bother writing software for anything but the One True Platform. Amen. Never mind the fact that Windows runs on...hmm, lets see...x86 and ummm...well. I suppose there might be a few others, but I couldn't tell you for the life of me what they are. Linux on the other hand...
If you're writing a client side/GUI app, you can get away with this mentality. Try it on the server side and your product goes nowhere. I believe this is one of the reaons that Microsoft has had (and will continute to have) problems getting entrenched in the Enterprise computing market.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah, out of context this quote doesn't make sense. Just like a lot of 'facts' in moores movies. Reading the sentence before, it actually means 'zero defects for this milestone'. So you got a milestone that says 'additional features available, existing features pass all test cases'. For the logically impaired this means: defects in new features a-ok, defects in prior features no-go.
I can't help to think that you have no-clue(tm) and are trying to hide it by mixing with the oss/developer crowd since expecting perfectness at every milestone can't come from extensive IT expierience.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
You're right to an extent, but think of it this way. Typically, MS programmers are good at what they do. It's doing what they're told to do that can be a problem. Or worse yet, teams not communicating with other teams (through their team lead/project manager/development manager) that can cause problems. Even worse than that, it can be QA departments that aren't fully testing or are not communicating all known issues back to development teams.
All of that can actually be attributed to poor management. Not necessarily in the sense of management not understanding the process, but leaning more toward the "ship the products for $$ sake" rather than "build better products for less profit, but better reuptation" business model.
MS is in the business to make money. So far that's worked out quite well for them, regardless of the quality of their products. OSS has done a fairly nice job of forcing MS slightly into the latter business model, but as we all know, not far enough. It may never happen that MS fully embraces the idea of building better products for less $$.
As a programmer with 13 years of professional experience, I can attest to the fact that an app with no defects/bugs/issues/ on the first compile would be a miracle. Programmers have trouble thinking like users and consequently have trouble imagining every possible way of breaking their app.
That being said, I firmly think that most of MS's problems with software have much more to do with management than with the developers themselves.
some developers from MS discuss how they deal with damage control on a daily basis. I think that would drum up some interest.
Typically, that's management's problem, and if it never makes it back to the developers, they continue coding on what they're told to code on.
My $0.02 anyway.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
22. Change direction then convince everyone that was the direction you were intending to go in at the start.
Like with portability.... NT was supposed to be the portable OS, on MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha. But as that didn't take off, now 'portability is for Canoes'.
No company can match Microsoft for blatant and unabashed hypocracy. This article is a good example.
Sure, many Microsoft products solve a particular set of customer problems. Yet the same products can and often do create a whole set of new problems (maybe you missed this story)
To me, there is more to "great software" than solving one set of problems. It is solving them well, and well... if you create more problems than you solve, I'm sorry but that isn't "great software".
Yes, I use alot of Windows software, and no I'm not a Linux zealot (love Knoppix though). With the exception of IE (which I abandoned long ago), most Microsoft software I use (Office, Outlook) is "good enough" but certainly not great.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I mean no disrespect, but I'm going to guess you've never been a software developer. If you were you'd know that every piece of software has bugs and issues, regardless of the language you use to describe them. In a perfect world internet time would stop while you developed your programs and you'd be able to work for as long as was needed to fix all the bugs, issues, and defects and produce a "perfect" program on time and on budget.
In the real world this doesn't happen. Deadlines slip, and if they slip to far management and / or devs have to decide what are the most important things to fix. Sometimes this means that documentation is left incomplete or with spelling errors, sometimes it means that if you click foo, bar, baz, while spinning on your right heal and alt-ctrl-hyper-meta-shift-clicking on the about box the program will crash or throw an error, and sometimes it means that spellcheck will be disabled until version 1.1 of the product. That's how development is, or a least in my experience.
Bullshit. I develop software, and have done so since '72. "Zero defects" is an absolute statement. One can wiggle all one wants, redefine the meaning of "zero", or redefine the meaning of "defects".
Still bullshit. A bug is a defect.
The reason it is parse down to a finite level is that "issue" is a generic term - and that's what we want
I am a developer. I have to track issues with my code. I have a single database to track feature requests, problem reports, bug reports, enhancement requests, and general suggestions. Each of these is referred to as an "issue". I frequently change an issue from being bug report to being an enhancement request. For example, "The software is broken because it won't rotate to 37 degrees. It will only rotate to 90, 180, or 270 degrees!".
This that a bug? The user reported it is a bug. Does that make it a bug? Is the software defective? Or is that a feature that needs coding?
Bug doesn't sound bad to anyone who knows something about software development. "Defect" sounds bad to just about everyone. Issue is used because it is vague, and that is often what is called for.
Microsoft may be a marketing company, but one that happens to be the world's largest and most profitable seller of software.
These "21 Rules Of Thumb" are distilled from McCarthy's "Dynamics of Software Development" book, which has been on the bookshelf of almost every dev lead I've ever worked with or known. You could have a similar "argument" about how good IBM software is (WebSphere?), but at the end of the day, if you're doing it to critique The Mythical Man Month, you're going to sound really dumb.
More importantly, all bitching about MSFT quality aside, McCarthy was dev/program manager on Visual C++, which is not a poorly-regarded Microsoft product (it's one of the best compiler products on the market). There are extremely successful products --- successful on every axis --- that come out of Microsoft. Visual C++, and McCarthy's book, represents one of them. Microsoft Excel, and Joel on Software, represents another.
Microsoft is a huge company with an enormous talent pool and many very qualified, very effective well-jelled teams. You do not sound credible when you try to tar them with the "Microsoft is buggy crap" brush, especially when you're arguing with McCarthy or Spolsky.
Oh, please.
By that deffinition, there is a lot of "great doftware" out there. And almost not bad software.
Good Software does what marketing says it does, correclty and as expected.
Great software is good sofware plus its simple to use and does things that you didn't expect it to do but that come in handy, while not annoying the hell out of its user.... more or less
just my huble opinion.
errera hunamum ets
I don't want to get into a flame fest
Right.
, but since you claim they don't produce the WORST product in the market, and since Windows is such a large part of their revenue, I challenge you to find:
First of all, the question itself is ridiculous. I can quite genuinely say that Windows XP has never crashed for me or been broken into. However, Linux has frozen up on me several times, and it has had kernel exploits in the past. But that doesn't make Linux less secure or less stable.
The fact that Windows is used WAY more than Linux means you'll get a greater total sum of crashes and breaches, but that doesn't make Windows less secure or less stable. You're arguing a ridiculous premise.
* An OS that is less secure than Windows.
Remember that Slashdot article about how Linux was the most-breached OS on the net? I sure do. A Slashdot editor even modified the headline so it said "Linux Most Attacked OS On Net" instead of "Most Breached" so it didn't look as bad.
* An OS that crashes more frequently than Windows.
Windows never crashes for me. I haven't seen a BSOD since 1999. But, Slashdotters seem stuck in the late 80s and think Windows 98 still represents the stability of Windows today.
I had Gnome crash my laptop under Red Hat 9 the very first time I used it. So fucking what?
* An OS with a EULA more restrictive than Windows.
This is a silly question to throw in. Windows' EULA isn't much more restrictive than, say, IBM's EULAs or Apple's. As if the EULA has anything to do with the operating system itself. Complain about the legal department but not the software development department.
* Software which has slipped the scheduled release date more often and by a larger margin than Windows. IIRC, Microsoft hasn't released on OS on time in the last 10 years.
Yeah, and how late was 2.6 again? Oh, that's right, it shipped a year later than Torvalds said it would. Again, this is a completely ridiculous argument.
I know it's l33t to be a raving Linux zealot, but a lot of people are really getting tired of it, as evidenced by the posts I've been seeing lately that are getting upmodded. I'm very pleased to see more and more people approaching things rationally and fairly now--even if Slashdot editors don't. The very fact that Clippy jokes and BSOD jokes are still upmodded--two things 95% of Windows users haven't seen since 1999--shows you how stuck in the past zealots are and how they won't let go of their old Windows 98 experience. They're competing with old 9x versions of Windows when meanwhile everyone else moved on when the codebase unification to the NT kernel happened in late 1999, and we got Windows 2000.
But, I forgot. This is the "year of Linux on the desktop." Hey, remember that article Slashdot posted that said Linux desktop usage would overtake Apple's in a year? I even had one Slashdotter cite it to me as evidence for a point he was making, simply because Slashdot had reported it. So much for that.
If you're a Linux newbie and you're coming here for tech news, you're doing yourself a great injustice, as everything will be skewed and you will get a huge wrong impression about how the tech world is doing.
Would you tell that to a holocust survivor? Someone that lost a spouse in the twin towers?
Yes, these Micorsoft's crimes are less important than that.
But that does not change the fact that they did it.
Look, every unrepentent criminal that gets caught goes through the following stages:
1. Denial - (I didn't do anything wrong)
2. Deprecation - (It was just a little thing)
3. Amnesia - (Forget about it, didn't I apologize... just let it go.)
SOME criminals have a 4th stage ... admittance, repentence. Microsoft has NEVER done this. They repeatedly commit multiple crimes and when judges try and punish them for it, they complain and show their cash and expect to be given minor punishments to keep their employees working. Microsoft has repeatedly used illegal methods to put more people out of business then they employ. They weasel there way out stuff. Their products are not superior except where they sabotage other people's products.
If they were 1/2 as good as they think they were they would not need to do the sabotage. Why should anyone let it go? That is stupid. We should never forget, so that when they try to commit more crimes we will be for-warned and pre-pared for their attempts.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
These rules of egoless programming have been circulating on various sites:
Like most platitudes, they apply in some situations and not in others and there are plenty of valid exceptions.
For instance: Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience -- but don't let them tell you how to do your job.
Or: Fight for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat -- and when you turn out to have been right, don't let anyone forget it.
Does every piece of software have bugs?
Does Knuth's TeX program have bugs? He will
send you a cheque if you find one
TeX was designed, then implemented. It works
Here is an example:
Say that you are writing an HTML widget.
Milestone n states that the widget will display paragraphs (<p> elements) correctly, but says nothing about the widget displaying tables correctly.
When the widget is tested, it displays paragraphs correctly, but does not display tables at all.
The widget is not fully working.
It has bugs.
But, in relation to milestone n, it has zero defects, i.e., it passes all of the tests for milestone n.
While I don't agree with everything in the article, and while I am no fan of Microsoft's, I think that the whole "zero defects" thing has been taken out of context here by several posters.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Fred Brooks covered this in The Mythical Man-Month. A budget gives you the ability to say "no" to the next desirable feature. Without a budget, the development process is limited only by the imagination of the engineers, which is infinite if you've hired the right people.
rather than deeply.
The Microsoft interview style is to ask the interviewee a constant stream of white board programming problems and throught puzzles. While this selects people with a certain level of intelligence, it also selects people who can think rapidly "on their feet".
Perhaps the end result is to select a homogenious population of "Softies" think fast, settle on an approach and then hack it into code. Where a better approach to product development might be to think about the design, think about some alternatives, discuss the design and then implement it.
Many people agree that Microsoft software evolves once it has been released. The common example being a first product that is inadequate, buggy and slow, eventually evolving into something that becomes popular. Perhaps this is a result of a culture of programmers who believe they are very smart (after all, they survived the Microsoft interview), think fast and then entomb their initial half-baked design in software.