Steve Jenson's blog

Windows gets the testing religion?

Windows gets the testing religion?

From the Wall Street Journal:
The 53-year-old Mr. Allchin, who joined Microsoft in 1990 and is now co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division, says he always disdained the fast-and-loose culture of PC software.
[...]
And Microsoft's culture was facing a new threat. The mass of patches and agglomerations that made up Windows turned it into an easy target for viruses and other Web-based attacks. Mr. Allchin had to divert top engineers into the effort to fix security problems in existing versions of Windows. "The ship was just crashing to the ground," Mr. Allchin says.
So they took a page out of the XP handbook:
By late October, Mr. Srivastava's team was beginning to automate the testing that had historically been done by hand.
[...]
As engineers began cooperating and Mr. Srivastava's team worked overtime to refine the tools, the quality of the code flowing into Longhorn began to improve. The time to create a new "build" fell to just a few days, allowing a faster cycle of writing and testing new code. After the Windows group was able to install a workable version of the system on their PCs four days before Christmas, Mr. Srivastava says the group celebrated by not working over the holidays.
Good, maybe this can convince people at larger companies to produce software with an xUnit framework and not just a wish and a handshake.

# — 26 September, 2005