E7 Blog: The Windows 7 Team | The Coffeehouse

BHpaddock

Earlier today Steven Sinofsky made a new post on the Windows 7 Engineering blog about the Windows 7 Team.

I also posted my own follow-up about the Find and Organize team on my blog Smiley

La Bomba
Boing!

"Paolo Marcucci is a PM who doesn’t seem to blog these days, but posts on Channel 9 a lot."

hahaha, hey one liners are easier than posting paragraphs. Smiley

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

I don't understand how Microsoft works in these teams? 40 testers per team?! 20 managers?

What does "product manager" do first of all, Microsoft seems to have tons of these people.

And is there really 1 person writing unit tests or whatever for every developer? Damn.

I think other companies like Google and Apple work a lot differently by the way. I don't know if it's better or worse, your style, but I find it interesting.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Bass

#Aug 18th, 2008 @ 10:28 PM

There are few "product managers" and they tend to be pretty high level positions whose job is to determine what goes into a product.

You may want to go and read Sinofsky's post where he details exactly what the roles are in a feature team. That will clear up what a dev or a pm do all day. I think a post on what a tester does is due soon (but keep in mind the official designation: Software Development Engineer in Test)

Goggle had more or less no concept of a PM position, but they've started to introduce it recently, to try to actually ship something Smiley

BHpaddock

In reply to Bass

#Aug 18th, 2008 @ 10:28 PM

40 testers per team?! 20 managers?

The 40 dev/test are actually split up further within each feature team. And the title Program Manager is not actually a "management" role. It's an engineering role just like developer, but instead of writing code, they write specs and such. Many of them have a computer science or programming background.

Also, SDETs aren't really "just testers." Their jobs generally entail writing lots of (test) code. In fact, many teams have their developers write the basic unit tests. The SDETs deal with more complex stuff.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

In reply to BHpaddock

#Aug 18th, 2008 @ 10:57 PM

It's a little bit difficult to understand from the outside how the roles work at Microsoft... the best approach is to forget this hierarchical thing and think as a team that works together where each one has it's own role but they all float into each other.

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

In reply to BHpaddock

#Aug 18th, 2008 @ 10:57 PM

I'm still a bit confused here, "product or program managers" write 'specifications', what the hell does that entail? Is there an example of such a specification on the net?

SDET or test engineers, why so many of these? You said the developers are the one that write unit tests, well what does SDET do? Press all the buttons? Is it like the Ron Livingston from Office Space?

I've read about the public information about these positions and they are all quite vague. The only thing that makes sense to me is "Software Engineer", but if they are really the only ones writing the actual algorithms, it would seem that they have the most intense job, but it looks like a lot of people don't agree. I just want to know why.

BHpaddock

In reply to Bass

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 12:15 AM

A spec is a document that says something like "The window will have a toolbar with 4 buttons. The first button does X operation, and looks like such and such. The second button will be disabled in such and such case. When enabled, it will do this and that."

They determine what customers want/need, and come up with solutions to the problems they have. They tend to have the greatest impact in determining which bugs get fixed and in what order, making sure we meet deadlines, etc.

SDETs do varying levels of manual testing depending on the team / group. Mostly they tend to focus on automated testing or development of tools.

Dr Herbie
Horses for courses

In reply to BHpaddock

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 12:34 AM

Sounds to me like a Microsft PM is involved mainly in release management?

Every company has their own definitions for job titles, so they could be anything!

Herbie

Dovella
Go Microsoft !!!!!!!

Thx Brandon!!!! Thx Paolo !!! THX TEAM!!!

matthews

In reply to Bass

#Aug 18th, 2008 @ 10:28 PM

If I read the blog post correctly, 40 is roughly the number of people per feature team on average. N is then the number of devs in that feature team, which is usually equivalent to the number of testers. Then there are usually about 0.5N PMs to go with those. Follow the numbers, and you'd have 16 devs, 16 testers, and 8 pms on an average feature team.

vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel

In reply to matthews

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 4:56 AM

Don't forget the Solicitors

BHpaddock

In reply to matthews

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 4:56 AM

Nope. 40 developers means 40 developers (and ~40 testers, and ~20 PMs).

KevinB

In reply to Dr Herbie

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 1:50 AM

That seems pretty close to what PM's do IMO. (I only skimmed the wiki entry though Smiley

)

Microsoft have always had PM's though, it is a fairly unique thing to the company traditionally, but seems pretty necessary when you are doing something of this size.

KevinB

In reply to Bass

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 12:15 AM

I'm still a bit confused here, "product or program managers" write 'specifications', what the hell does that entail? Is there an example of such a specification on the net?

There are two roles you mentioned there :

Product Manager -- Tend to be high up and organize a product
Program Manager -- Engineers that write spec's and help co-ordinate individual test/dev resources in a feature crew.

would be the rough way that I describe them.

Kevin

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Dr Herbie

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 1:50 AM

Eventually, the role of a PM shifts from feature design to feature management during the product lifecycle. In the former, the PM writes and advocates specs for his feature, coordinating resource allocation and messaging. Everything is very fluid and the ability to think on your feet and keep a tab on other teams' work (to coordinate and leverage) is essential.

Then, when development starts, the PM become part of the bug triage team (PM, dev, test) that decides when and how to resolve issues that crop up during development. At this point he's also responsible for introducing and vetting DCRs (design change requests). The situation now is much more structured with the PM involved mostly in making sure that dev and test can do their work without interference and distractions.

After development is completed, the PM keeps triaging incoming bugs but starts to take care of other aspects like localization, release management, support, policy compliance, etc etc etc.

In the end, it's the PM that presses the "Publish" button on the CMS that makes the bits available to the public Smiley

We PMs don't like to talk about dunk tanks or other fun activities...

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

In reply to PaoloM

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 9:11 AM

Hey PaoloM why are you referring to the PM as a guy..."specs for his feature"....hasn't the WM_IN series taught you anything?

I would recommend using "his/her" and "he/she".

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Zeo

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 10:04 AM

In fairness, I was just talking about myself in 3rd person.

Now, that behaviour alone carries a whole set of psychological implications that I'd rather not explore right now... Smiley

BHpaddock

In reply to Zeo

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 10:04 AM

The language convention in English and most romance languages is that when someone is referring to a gender-ambiguous person in the third-person, he/she should use the masculine form of the pronoun. If he/she were to use both pronouns with a slash everytime he/she wanted to write something about another person in this way it would no doubt make his/her writing far more cumbersome to read for you/me.

I prefer to think that it goes without saying that there are lots of great women in all the roles mentioned.

harumscarum
out of memory

In reply to BHpaddock

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 7:15 AM

Man/woman it must be nice to have all those people! Smiley

brian.shapiro
things go on as always

In reply to BHpaddock

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 10:57 AM

No actually its very easy to substitute alternative words if someone really cared to do it, it just takes a conscious decision to change the wording.

Very often you just have sentences in which you're talking about the person themselves, in which you can refer to them as 'they'. (Notice how I just did it-- using 'themselves' and 'them'). You can also in any event choose to substitute more explicit wording, like 'the person'.

He/she needs to pick it up. ->
They need to pick it up.
OR,
The person needs to pick it up.

I personally don't care if people use the masculine pronoun, I learned on my own to write like this because in elementary school! I had a feminist teacher who would get upset if you used the masculine pronoun for ambiguous cases (she also demanded to be called Ms. instead of Mrs.---I called her 'Miss'), and I hated constructions like "he/she" so I just learned to write a bit more flexibly--.

BHpaddock

In reply to brian.shapiro

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 11:12 AM

"They" is grammatically incorect when referring to an individual. The proper english is "he."

"The person" often works grammatically, but like the he/she construct, can be clumsy. Since it isn't a pronoun it often feels more disconnected from the subject/object being referred to. For example, "Someone stole my hat! The person went that way!" The sentences feel disconnected. "They" is more effective, and plenty of people would use it. But as I said, it is grammatically incorrect.

brian.shapiro
things go on as always

In reply to BHpaddock

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 11:31 AM

I beg to differ, they works perfectly and sounds perfectly fine. Just because you expect 'they' to refer to a plural, doesn't mean thats its limited to that grammatical purpose. 'They' only sounds right when the person is unknown. If you're referring to a specific person, 'they' sounds bizarre

'You' which we also think of as singular also refers to the plural all the time, where I refer to 'your' , as a way of using 'you' to represent a group of people. The origins of this is because 'you' referred to the formal 2nd person, while 'thou/thy/thine/etc.' was informal.

Its the same as when you have the 'royal we', where a person uses himself to represent a group, by virtue of some role in the group.

'They' is historically also the formal sense of 'him/her'. By referring to someone as 'they' you are being inspecific and formal.

Grammar in practice isn't formed from a rule book in a school, its formed from real word usage, which comes from historical development. The best test is what words work and sound good.

brian.shapiro
things go on as always

In reply to brian.shapiro

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 11:43 AM

A much simpler way to put it is when you use "they" to refer to a person, you're talking about the person as any number of people.

So if you say "When the child comes in here they will find themselves comfortable"--talkinga bout a school--- you're referring to any number of children, girls or boys, who may or may not be doing the same thing and only using 'the child' to stand in for the idea of any number of children.

So the formal pronoun is appropriate, as its a similar situation as the 'royal we'. You can replace the sentence with "When they come in here they will find themselves comfortable", specifically referring to the group of possible children, instead of using 'the child' as a proxy.

EDIT: I used there instead of here because of a mistake in my editing, usually you want to say goes in there instead of comes in there, although comes in there is still grammatically OK given a specific context. Smiley

TommyCarlier
I want my scalps!

In reply to brian.shapiro

#Aug 19th, 2008 @ 11:51 AM

I remember occasionally reading articles where the author is using "she" and "her" everywhere.