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: : Case Study: Microsoft Office 2000 : Question: How has Microsoft’s approach to development changed over the last ten : years? What factors have driven these changes? : Response: Going back to when Bill Gates founded Microsoft Corporation in 1975, the development process was described by Jon DeVaan, vice president in charge of office 2000, as the “development herd”. Microsoft had one central team, which was in charge of developing all our applications. Once the project team finished developing the latest release of Word, they then started on Excel. So everyone worked on everything. : The development process at Microsoft was very informal, with little emphasis on keeping to schedules or following a prescribed software development methodology. Relying on superstar programmers was not seen as a viable long-term strategy, there are a lot of problems with relying on individual superstars after the programmer moves on someone has to maintain and update the software they’ve written and often other people have difficulty understanding their code. : The first move to gain more control and specialization in its development efforts happened in August 1988, with the formation of the applications division. Within this division, a number of specialized business units were created, each focused on a specific application, for example, Office Business Unit and the Excel Business Unit. : Then Microsoft began to formalize a new role in the project team, a project manager. Their role was to integrate and coordinate the efforts of everyone involved in the project and was responsible for overseeing the development effort. Even with success of Office 4.2 in 1994, the development process needed some attention with the conflict of application teams especially between the Word and Excel groups, where they had debates on height of the toolbars; in result Office released with two different visuals. : Microsoft responded with making two major changes to the Office organization. First it decided that all the application contained in Office would have to follow the same development timeline. Secondly, it introduced a new unit within the applications division-the Office Products Unit (OPU). The purpose of this unit was to “oversee the shared customer experience.” They are going to share graphics and drawing tools, share user interface and they created shared code to included within each application. : In Office 97, the OPU team had been successful in integration across all application divisions, however, there still was to many arguments over shared content. As a result, for Office 2000, Microsoft decided to fold the integration teams from each application division into OPU. Entire features now were owned by OPU, meaning it could add or change any features, without having to get the agreement of the application teams as long as the feature was integrated into each application. : For Office 2000, senior management team and product planning was gathering data on the potential options by sending out instrumented versions of the software to 500 volunteer customers. Over a period of three months, these versions were gathering keystrokes and commands made by customers. This process gave development teams valuable information on the features used most frequently, and how long customers spent on each menu screen. At the same time, a new “Office Advisory Council” (OAC) was formed, comprising staff from 15 large corporations that were targets for the new version of the product. : Other development process was keeping to a pre-set schedule, so they developed milestones. Within each milestone, the detailed activities of developing and testing actual code. Developers working on new features were required to frequently check in their work to the main code base. This allowed the team to get rapid feedback on the new code and test its interactions with the rest of the design. The work completed by the developers was check in every day for review. As the process when on there was only four hours to turn in code and there were 400 people trying to do this at the same time. : :

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