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: Hi everybody, this is what I have so far. Pls let me know if you have any suggestions on how to critique it. : Critique the process through which Office 2000 was developed: : How did the team resolve uncertainty in the early stages of development? : The team for office resolved uncertainty in the early stages of development in 2 different ways, they began the vision-setting process by focusing on overall issues mainly concerning the direction the software should take, having on mind the new threats and opportunities presented by the internet. Their main issue was to decide if they should radically change office 2000 in order to better adapt to internet requirements or approach the new product based on an evolution of their previous versions. : At the same time the senior management was gathering information from customer research to feed into the process by using customer volunteer surveys (instrumented versions of the software that recorded keystrokes, commands and other details), on site customer visits, and the formation of a new Office Advisory Council consisting of 15 large corporations considered the target market of the product. : As result, the team found that people wanted to be able to deploy and manage the software across the corporation and also to put their enterprise data up on the web avoiding proprietary interfaces leading to the vision, “best execution of an integrated suite of Internet-centric communication and productivity tools for creating, editing, sharing, synthesizing, and analyzing business information”. : : What role did milestones and daily build up play in development? : Since the new emphasis for the office 2000 team was to keep to a pre-set schedule rather than keep developing until a set of features had been completed, each application was broken down into a number of milestones (with a set of exit criteria) and once a milestone was reached the project would be held until the exit criteria (20-30 per milestone) was satisfied. : If the amount of work required exceeded the buffer time, problematic features were re-scheduled into the next milestone. As a consequence, the scope of development in subsequent stages was reduced so that the preset schedule data could still be attained. : Also, within each milestone detailed testing of the code and developing activities were carried in a well-defined process; developers were required to “check –in” new code at the end of the day to the master version of the product in order to be tested determining whether or not there would be any major errors in the code. Then after the check in period was closed at the end of each day, the test department would build the complete product and compile the code in binary series. Next, more complex tests were run in the procedure called “Build Verification Test” and finally the product was sent to the release verification team to run the most comprehensive set of tests.

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