2005-11-06
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There is no such thing as a completely bug-free software product. But how does (and should) software vendors decide when "good enough" really will be good enough — at least until the first service pack hits?
That's a question Microsoft's developer division no doubt will be reconsidering in the coming days and months.
This past weekend, days before Microsoft was set to
The Mini-Microsoft blogger "Who da' Punk" kicked things off with the post "Hey Shareholders: VS 2005 Is Fantastic." And the snowball started rolling.
The background: November 7 is the launch party for Visual Studio 2005 and its cohorts, Microsoft began shipping Visual Studio "Whidbey" and SQL Server "Yukon" over a week ago. So developers and customers have been playing with the final gold code for a few days. And it turns out some of those developers have encountered problems with Visual Studio 2005 — mostly around the IDE (integrated development environment) core. Because Visual Studio 2005 is so intertwined with SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, some commentators began speculating about the quality of the other two members of Microsoft's app-platform trio, as well.
This isn't the first time last-minute bug reports cast a shadow over a Microsoft product launch. Having written the infamous "Windows 2000 Still Has 64,000 Bugs" story that broke in February 2000, I remember (as I'm sure the Windows development team does, too), the impact those kinds of comments can have.
In the Windows 2000 case, a Microsoft manager used the 64,000 data point — cited in an e-mail message sent to his troops — to attempt to incite his team to improve code quality. Given Microsoft's legal legacy, which has fostered an understandable reticence to use mail to document anything that could later be used against the company, I doubt there is a similar e-mail trail around Visual Studio 2005. (But if there is, I'd love to take a gander at that e-mail missive, too.)
The fact remains that some folks are having trouble with the final version of the Visual Studio 2005 product. And some of these bugs were known and purposefully "postponed" because they were discovered late in the product-ship cycle.
To be fair, Visual Studio 2005 underwent a couple of years of rigorous testing by tens of thousands of beta customers and developers. There was plenty of tester feedback, but
What should be Microsoft's next step? The anonymous Mini Microsoft suggests "what VS needs to do is say, in a manner that won't dampen the launch party: Hey, this was a super-big innovative release but it looks like some bugs unfortunately shipped. Okay, we're really going to ship a VS 2005 service pack. Here's the Microsoft forum we'd appreciate you providing feedback to. Here's a link that you can keep track of what's going into the service pack. Furthermore, the service pack will ship on fill in a date no longer than six months out."
That sounds like great advice, to me. We Microsoft watchers have been told that "Orcas," a k a Visual Studio 2007, is the next tool suite update on tap and that Whidbey bug fixes will be addressed there.
Update:
C# blogger Eric Maino , blogged that "the biggest lesson that we learned on this most recent version (Visual Studio 2005) was that we were not agile enough and we took too long to ship."
Given that caveat, it doesn't sound as if Microsoft is contemplating slowing its release schedule. Could that negatively impact product quality? Or will more frequent, smaller releases of major products like Visual Studio be more likely to have fewer bugs? How has your organization decided on when a product is bug-free enough to ship? Have any lessons to share on this one?
Talk back below or write me at mswatch@ziffdavis.com and let me know what you think.
This article was originally published on microsoft-watch.com.
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