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Why Vista Release Date Really Slipped
anzev writes "A team manager for Windows for 5 years has decided to write a blog-essay about what caused Windows Vista project to miss the due date. Philip tells us in the blog, that Windows developers are writing an average of 5000 lines of code (which is *only* 1200 lines less than the national average of 6200 lines of code per year). He addresses issues like the Vista code being too complicated, the processes the developers have to follow too complex and a lot more. All in all it gives a nice insight into why Vista will be late, from a different perspective. Oh, and Slashdot gets mentioned too ;-)."
This isn't some critical release patch.
This isn't some driver that's long overdue.
Microsoft never hand signed a sheet of paper telling me that I would have my copy of "Longhorn" by the end of 2005 or even 2006.
It's a new operating system. More importantly, it's an operating system that has to compete with OSX, Linux, Unix & Windows XP. That's right, they are going to have to figure out someway to improve Windows XP. They aren't stuffing Madden 2005 into Madden 2006 and I hope they are taking their sweet ass time to rework some of the Windows internals that may have been a long time plague on the OS.
My point is that they're making something new and probably forging new ground. According to this article, they suffered the same thing a lot of projects have suffered. You project management plan looks great in Microsoft Project. Then you print it out and re-wallpaper the offices only to have the developers sift through it and go, "What the fsck?"
If Vista is as complicated as its specs say it is, I hope Microsoft takes another two years to get this done because I don't want to have to put up with Vista SP1, Vista SP2, Vista SP3, etc. down the line. I think games like WoW took a lot of time to make but it paid off to be a really stable engine with great features that blew everyone away. Microsoft could learn from that. You might upset some fans and you might piss your boss off but misinformation/miscommunication in the early stages of a project only lead to its downfall. If you can voice concern/dissent to your boss, I suggest you get a new job. We're human beings, we are fallible and we do have limits. Even if we're hand selected by Microsoft's HR department.
I'm reminded of a story about Hitler where the Allies had broken through French beaches at Normandy (unexpectedly) and Hitler's aides were at his house trying to figure out how they could wake Hitler up and inform him of the brigade of tanks rushing across the countryside towards them. Because they all feared for their lives, no one ended up waking him up and they lost a whole lot of ground & a few resources because of it. If you run your company through fear and people can't talk back to you, you'll end up like Hitler. Dead in a ditch with petrol all over you.
I'm also getting really sick and tired of people measuring a project's greatness by KLOC. It's also very frustrating to hear people brag about how many KLOC they write each year. That's great--now how do I know it's not riddled with bugs or a complete memory hog? What ever happened to the desire for elegant computer code? When I see a program that does something quickly and elegantly, my brain releases the same chemical that I used to get when I saw beautiful math proofs. I know this is the mark of the nerd but there's something very satisfying about it.
One last note, this MSDN blogging site does not care for Firefox. The right hand side of the text hangs over about an inch into the right bar side and it's annoying because the text spills onto the calendar. I certainly hope this doesn't happen on purpose.
My work here is dung.
Obviously the other thing that is too complex is the whole to/too/two thing ;)
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
Wow, who uses lines of code as a metric. It's an aweful metric to use. I have seen many bad coders produce a lot of code. Lines of code as a metric encourages cut and paste reuse instead of abstraction of common ideas and functions.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Debian isn't a concerted effort by any stretch of the imagination. It consists of thousands of modules that really exist independently of one another; the vast majority of them were not even written specifically for Debian at all, but rather for Linux in the general sense. They were simply included in the package. I'd go so far as to guess that some of them made it in "by proximity" -- they were in the same directory as something useful, and someone came along and did a 'cp coolutility/* /distro/coolutility/*'.
Now, if the Debian project managers were told to write specs for all n-thousand of these modules, and then told "deliver these modules so we can have the next 'eager beaver' release," then you'd be looking at a concerted effort.
John
How in the world did Vista ever become the "largest software project in mankind's history"? I mean, this is an operating system. This is just an OS for a microcomputer, for pity's sake! It's not running the Internation Space Station. It's not running a nuclear aircraft carrier. It's just supposed to manage a personal computer.
This shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't be so big, or so complicated. I know we expect our computers to do a lot these days, but still. . . Shouldn't application software do most of the heavy lifting anyhow? I'm just trying to figure out why it takes hundreds of megabytes of OS -- and fifty levels of dependencies, according to the article -- to manage a desktop computer and provide APIs.
He said:
The types of software management issues being dealt with by Windows leaders are hard problems, problems that no other company has solved successfully.
Nobody else has solved the problems? How is it that OSX, which contains many of the features that Vista is due to have, shipped years ago? Before the Microsoft fanboys start with "Ah but it's different...", I think Microsoft is guilty of making their own problems... Perhaps some problems shouldn't be solved in software, but should be solved at the level of how your company works.
The guy is saying there are 50 layer dependencies, and tons of circular dependencies. It's software engineering 101, their model is wrong...they're not properly abstracting out each layer. I'm not a big fan of Linux, but every module can be decoupled in it, and modules work together even though they're written by completely different projects due to standards...that's how you design a proper system.
People are always concerned about writing out gobs and gobs of code that isn't properly thought out. That's the problem with a lot of software development these days (namely OSS). I've been digging through a rather large and prominent OSS project and found that its code looks like it's been hacked together.
People need to start focusing on code density. By code density, I mean how much thought goes into each line you write. High code density will almost always give you a good result, take Google for example, I've found that almost everything they have has been well thought-out, and not hacked together in a rush.
If MS has told the developers to slow down and think through everything, I think everyone (who will use Visa) will benefit in the end. I'd rather have a late OS that works than one that is early and feels rushed. Now before I get flamed and labelled as a Windows fanboy, I should mention that I use OSX as my native desktop OS and Linux (Gentoo) for my personal servers.
I didn't think that Leonard Nimoy was "late", wikipedia and imdb make no mention of it.
Has this just happened, or are you personally aquainted with said gentleman and simply lamenting his constant tardiness?
Yes, lines of code is a crap metric, but let's face it--the "manufacturing frozen hamburgers in a box"-school MBAs don't understand software development, and never will. I work for a subsidiary of Really Big Company (no, that's not implying their company name is RBC, or has those letters as the first part of any of their name bits), and Really Big Company mostly supplies a particular kind of hardware to the world of commerce. Our new company president has a degree in engineering, and historically he's been a hardware sort of guy.
(He's not a bad person. Honestly. He's under the same gun as the rest of us, and working hard to make sure we meet our targets. I'm not doing character assassination here--at least not directed toward specific individuals.)
The folks at Really Big Company give us revenue targets every year. If we miss those targets, the next year the targets are higher, no matter the state of the economy, the solvency of customers in our particular market niche, or our saturation level in that market niche. To me it makes no sense, but I'm not an MBA. (Clearly the management team at Really Big Company doesn't consist of too many dog owners. It's patently obvious that if a dachshund can't jump through a hoop two feet off the ground, it won't be able to jump through a hoop three feet off the ground. Perhaps they're avoiding that concept to skirt patent infringement issues.)
(Personal aside: my older cousin, a mechanical engineer by training, got an MBA last year. I consider him a traitor to the cause, and am no longer speaking with him. He doesn't know it, and I can't tell him, because I'm not speaking with him.)
The problem with hardware people, and it doesn't matter whether the hardware is computers, lawn mowers, or frozen hamburgers in a box, is that they deal in tangibles. At the end of the quarter, either one has 1,000 model 59-C units in the warehouse for delivery, or one doesn't. At any time during the quarter, one can count the number of computer model 59-C units and see whether or not the schedule will be met. One can determine whether or not vendors are supplying the parts required to build 1,000 model 59-C units at a rate commensurate with meeting the EOQ deadline.
The problem is, software is entirely intangible. We don't have vendor issues--if we have a compiler, an editor, and a computer on which to work, we're good. As far as the MBAs know, we're spinning moonbeams and weaving webs of purest electricity. While the reality is not quite that prosaic, it's not far from the truth. Everything I have ever done in my programming career (even that game I marketed 15 years ago, the source code for which is still on my latest computer at home) exists purely as an abstraction, nothing more than specifically-configured magnetic signatures.
What we know at the outset of the software project is that we want a Program That Works. What we don't know is how long that's going to take, and it's hard to estimate how long writing a new file system, security layer, or UI component might be, even if we've done it before in another context. The difference between building model 59-C units and writing software is that halfway through the manufacturing cycle no one comes to tell you that the model 59-C unit has been partially redesigned, and that it now uses a stainless steel internal frame instead of cast aluminum. (In the world of tangibles manufacture, the stainless steel version would have a new model number. This doesn't happen with software. The requirements change, and we keep calling it the same old thing.) Specific case, referencing Vista: suddenly WinFS is not part of the shipping configuration, so all the code in other parts of Vista that assumed WinFS would be present have to be rewritten, and then retested both at the unit and integration level. This stuff takes time. It can't be done on the original schedule.
The
If MS has the guts to burn 10 Billion - 20 Billion on getting a new OS paradigm on to every plattform on the planet and do a good job at the same time they'll maybe make it.
;-) Their problem was that, due to their development rules, they couldn't sell it for less than $50,000 and recover their development costs. And they couldn't sell more than a handful at that price.
;-).
...
It's perhaps worth mentioning that this was essentially IBM's approach back in the early days of "desktop" computers around 1980. There was this flock of little upstarts challenging IBM's growing stranglehold on the computer business by building small, cheap computers. IBM actually had a desktop computer, and it got very good reviews from its users. (What was it's 4-digit number? I've forgotten, but it was pretty good.
So they farmed the job out to one of those startups, run by Bill Gates and a few of his buddies, handed them a few hundred million for marketing, and didn't impose the IBM development rules on them. The result was crap compared to any of the CP/M desktops, but with a marketing budget greater than the operating budgets of all the upstarts combined, the result was what IBM wanted.
Microsoft has understood the lesson of this from the start, and put their money into marketing rather than quality product. Until now, maybe. If the reports of their growing development rules and costs are true, they may be going the way of IBM. They'll produce a good system for the first time in their history, but to avoid going bankrupt from the cost, they'll have to get a very good price for it, and only the wealthiest (and stupidest) will pay that price. If this is true, we're seeing a repeat of the IBM/Microsoft story from a quarter century ago.
Of course, IBM didn't die. In fact, they completed their conquest of the "mainframe" market, which was willing to buy IBM no matter what the cost. They completely own that field, and development has pretty much come to a halt. Due to MS's market clout, we could see the same outcome. They will own the "desktop", and further development in that market will grind to a halt. They'll still sell to the "MS at any cost" market. But it won't matter to most of us, because we'll more and more consider "desktop" computers relics of a previous age. We'll stop worrying about making new systems "compatible with the desktop" (i.e., clones of MS's systems), just as 25 years ago we stopped worrying about whether our little computers were IBM compatible (and we didn't bother with PL/I or JCL
So what should we call the new thing we're building while ignoring IBM and Microsoft? "Web 2.0" seems to be out (and wasn't very good anyway), but the new thing will certainly be Net-based. Any good suggestions for a name that will supercede "desktop"? Maybe we need a catchy two-syllable name for the software going into the OLPC project. Push for making it a truly distributed, comm-based system without any central control, so the comm companies and local governments can't take it over as they're doing with the Web. We can base it on zillions of small components, so a company that refuses to follow standards can't make any inroads. The "new paradigm" will be as outside Microsoft's world view as PC/DOS was outside IBM's world view.
C'mon, we need a catchy new name
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Now, if the Debian project managers were told to write specs for all n-thousand of these modules, and then told "deliver these modules so we can have the next 'eager beaver' release," then you'd be looking at a concerted effort.
You have answered youself: TFA asks if a project the size of Windows in controllable. In an environment where the tone is set by Steve Ballmer the answer sure looks like "No." Maybe "Hell no."
TFA also states Windows has 50 layers and circular dependencies. Linux has complex version and interface dependencies, too. But, evidently, the Windows dependencies are hairy enough to flummox 2000 smart people working in "concert" while Linux gets by with only a handful or people working in the same place at the same time and a much simpler process.
That is, Linux has better modularity and less process.
That points to the depth of the problem at Microsoft: They will have to change almost everything about how Windows is made in order to get a different result:
They have to stop telling developers to "do or die." Has that ever happened in the entire course of Linux development? Probably not. It's something that software project management can do without.
They have to get strong product management that knows which features are actually important, so you don't get that "do or die" message being sent to teams that are making things that don't add that much value.
They have to decouple development more: Why on Earth do you need to have 2000 people working in concert on any software project? That's a bug, not a feature.
They have to un-layer their management structure. 11 layers? That's ridiculous for a software company.
There is no one prescription for success. Apple succeeds by having very strong product management, so they know which features are actually important to the end user. Linux succeeds by having no product management at all, and having to adapt process to the practical constraints of being FOSS. Microsoft is stuck in the middle: Not enough product management strength to know which parts really deserve a "do or die" effort, and so much process, interdependency, and management layers that any of the 500 product managers Microsoft already employs that are smart enough to make these decisions can't possibly put them into effect.
I wrote parts of this stuff