John Pruitt - Development Cycle at Microsoft

Interesting - this can come in handy for my project management for a senior design class.

My perception of MS products is that versions seem to be coming thick and fast of late. Which is different to what used to happen. Is the Business guilty of moving the stock around the store to keep the buyer from becoming habitual?

Given that we are all subject to to some degree of Pavlovian conditioning, the small changes that take place seem more of a nuisance than of real value.

Instead of tinkering with a products look and feel should MS instead be investing in heuristic learning as the user interacts with the product?

This is partly there in the Intellisense features.

The Channel 9 Team wrote:

John Pruitt explains the development cycle at Microsoft -- the interview takes place inside the "watching" part of one of our usability labs where teams can videotape and watch everyday people as they try to use software that we're producing.

Video length: 00:21:44.

Great stuff.  Great effort.  Very interesting...

... if I wanted to write a term paper about Microsoft's development cycle.

Problem is - I don't. 

I want to know how they write good code.  This is the ten mile high view - show us the OS hackers who work on the Kernel - how do they surf the helpfiles when they are trying to solve a problem?  Show us the WHQL people that test iterative software/hardware drivers on all those platforms looking for problems.

Seriously aren't we taking ourselves too seriously with these videos?  If we were truely exellent developers, shouldn't we be using digital technology instead of a white board?

I want to see Microsoft's best side, I don't think this is it.  I'm not saying this to hurt anyone's feelings, I'm sorry if it does.  I just think we could do a lot better.

Please tell me if this is out there somewhere and I missed it - I have not covered all the Channel 9 content yet.  Quite honestly I didn't sit through this video, I got tired of trying to understand what was on the whiteboard and hearing about the bad lighting after the first ten minutes.

Again don't get me wrong, great effort, I like the fact that Channel 9 is here and what it's goal is.  I'm very excited to have found this place.

Regards,



Shade
-The gutless guy who stirs the pot without putting his real name and telephone number up - (Kudos Scoble)

I second Shade's opinion that I'm not so much interested in the 10 mile high view [although i disagree on some points Shade has made, but that doesn't matter now].  This is what made me abandon Robert Hess and his .net show. At the beginning they started with some quite interesting stuff.. but Mr. Hess really likes to talk about the high level aspects.. things have gotten more and more general over the months. I am interested in the vision and motivation of the projects ms are working on. But not really if they're explained in a 2 hour video.
I hope Channel9 doesn't walk down the path of visions and motivations like Hess did.

That said, and also like Shade said, "don't get me wrong" I really like Channel9, hitting the refresh button every few hours. I just hope it doesn't get too general and conceptual one day (with exceptions being made when it comes to future stuff like the Phoenix compiler project, c#3.0, etc.. whatever 's of interest. interviews with Anders Heijlsberg and Kang Su Gatlin are the best videos on site, imo).

enjoy your holidays guys.

thanks for your reply, Scoble! This is another thing about channel9 I like ... we're heard

[i should hand out some towels to clean everything up after this sentence, I know]

Thanks, meat is what is quite interesting to all of us...