Windows 7 development reorganized
Steve Sinofsky took over management of the Windows development team after Windows Vista. He was in charge of Office development for a number of years prior. I’ve been reading snippets over the past few years about how the development methodology of Windows 7 had changed. And how Windows Vista development methodology had become too complex.
Now an interesting post by Larry Osterman, long time MS Windows OS developer mentions that. Windows 7 Reflections… In particular read the second last paragraph, the last long paragraph.
Let me also add that I have a great deal of respect for the Microsoft, and other successful, large team development efforts. As you can imagine I mostly work by myself on apps which I have created. With Access when you’re testing things you generally only need to test one or a few related forms or reports. Once the correct data gets into the table you’re done. You don’t need to worry about this bit of external code or that global variable. After all, in my apps, global variables come from the global options table.
But with the Auto FE Updater it’s quite different. There are a lot of global variables and a minor change over here can cause significant problems in an unexpected area over there. Another way of putting this is I really need to figure out some means of doing thorough automated testing with all the possible options. But I’m too busy right now. (Yeah, I can just see some of you shaking your head and thinking “Tony, you’re gonna get real busy if you don’t take the time now.)
My Granite Fleet Manager is being used by a number of Hutterite colonies. Good, intelligent people but they’re not that computer literate. Indeed my app may have been the reason they’re seeing a computer for the first time. Every once in a while I’ll get a phone call about a bizarre problem. Once I realize what they did I realize that I should’ve put better error checking in that particular field. What they did makes sense from their viewpoint. It just hadn’t occurred to me that someone might do whatever it is they did.
As a result I can now understand why there’s generally a developer and a tester working together. And the more “twisty minded” the tester the better.
P.S. I added an Auto FE Updater group in LinkedIn. Feel free to join the group or email me your irritants, pain points and suggestions.