Kev's Development Toolbox

I assume this blog article is written by a current Microsoft employee since it is hosted on the MSDN site.

The author claims to be a prior manager of a development team working on Vista development, and offers some interesting insight into software development issues within Microsoft, on what they claim is the “largest concerted software project in human history”. I’m not sure if this is true, but 2000 developers working on a single system with over 50 million lines of code, this is not insignificant.

The author describes what he considers ‘the usual suspects’ of project overrun – code complexity and over complicated processes. From my own experience I would say the number one issue is always management enforced, unrealistic deadlines, regardless of the amount of work involved – but he does mention this later in the article.

The two main issues he describes are very eye opening – not because the problems are new to anyone in software development, but because these issues are occuring within Microsoft (surely not?) – an organization assumed to have the software development process well buttoned up.

The main issue he describes as ‘Cultured to Slip’ – he describes that due to the pressures of management wanting to see results and only hear about progress, when issues are raised they are ignored bu management and so people stopped telling the truth. If management ask a question they get the answer they expect to hear, regardless of whether it is true or not. Wow. Now that is a problem that is indicative of major cultural issues within their organization.

The second point is regarding ‘too many cooks’. Many of us have seen this before.

At this rate it will be a small miracle if we ever see Vista released. This is a very interesting article worth a read. I would take it with a grain of salt since the author defintely has a grudge and this may be worse than it actually is, but it’s still an eye opening read.

(The URL to the article seems to be down – the server is responding with ‘server too busy’ error – I wonder if this article is about to be removed?)

JBoss World 2006 is currently going on in Vegas this week. This blog entry from a participant at the conference mentions a statement that was made about JBoss dropping JMX as part of the server architecture used to start and stop the server’s services. This seems like a drastic change since the JBoss architecture has revolved around JMX and up until this point everything has been exposed and controlled via JMX.

I expect we’ll hear more about what this change actually means shortly.

Rails is getting a lot of attention from people asking ‘so how does it perform?’, and ‘will it scale?’. This article by Stefan Kaes on InfoQ.com looks at some typical problems found in current Rails application code and how to rewrite the code to improve performance.

Hot on the heels of Google’s launch of their online spreadsheet web-app that has already gained a lot of attention in the press, Microsoft have described further details of their plans for ‘Windows Live’.

Windows Live is Microsoft’s latest attempt to gain traction in the web-application space, and their plans to sell online access to applications as an alternative to users purchasing and installing software onto their PCs.

This is not their first attempt – their previous attempt was the ‘Hailstorm’ initiative which came and went without hardly anyone noticing back in 2001. Were they too early with this approach before? Possibly. Then again, maybe customers are still not ready for subscription based online services. Especially if someone like Google is giving away a killer online spreadsheet – why would I pay to ‘rent’ one from Microsoft?

This almost sounds too familiar – are they being beaten at their own game? Remember when Microsoft starting giving away free copies of Internet Explorer? Look what this did for Netscape.

One interesting note in this article – the comment about deploying apps to a ‘rich client’ – “Microsoft seek to make it easier to write mashup applications that run on a “rich client,” or a full-featured Windows PC, rather than through a browser” – given the current trend to try and deploy rich client applications via the browser, this could be a step in the right direction – to offer a platform with support for rich client application deployment, but without the curent limitations of the browser (as we know it today)?