an entry from
Piotr's R&D blog
State of the Practice II @ ICSE
The Evolution of Development at Microsoft
This talk flowed so well, I didn't want to be distracted with taking down details during the presentation. The basic premise was that Microsoft used to hack things up quickly because that's what the environment (other hackers) accepted; they just weren't bothered enough about bugs to make it worthwhile to invest into QA. The landscape has changed, and Microsoft now concentrates on quality a lot more. They are switching to agile practices, but each team (of 400+ total) chooses their own process. They do have common quality gates (e.g. testing coverage, coding standards, published specs, etc.) that all the groups have to pass through. The speaker encouraged people do "just do what makes sense": you need some rules to avoid chaos, but not so much as to stifle creativity and motivation. Mostly, it comes down to hiring good, ambitious people, and having them compete against each other.
Software Architecture in an Open Source World
Roy Fielding gave this talk, but while I admire the guy's work and his no-nonsense (if a little adiplomatic) attitude on mailing lists, the presentation was pretty bad. He spent most of his time talking about seemingly meaningless details of the various software systems he's been involved with. It's entirely possible that those details were meant to be examples of architectural principles, but if so he hid the relationship really well. Yawn.