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Agile teams at Microsoft?

Well, I was just reading ex-MSFT guy Moishe Lettvin's entry about how the start menu put together.  In brief, there was a lot of wasted time in meetings (my interpretation), waiting for code to arrive, thrashing due to dependencies, and not a lot of writing actual code.  It sounds like the feature ended up missing the vision, too.

 

That's got to be a pretty miserable year.

 

There are big differences between different teams here at Microsoft in terms of culture, process, productivity, etc.  Of course there are some shared advantages/pain points, as well.  Making Vista has definitely spurred changes to a number of these areas, because there are real issues.  Improving the speed with which changes are reflected in the builds is important (although there's a trade-off between things moving quickly and too many changes to investigate to understand a regression - I don't advocate a single branch for a team the size of Windows), and there are a number of process changes underway.  These are issues that will affect every team to a varying extent.  But there are a lot of other issues as well that individual teams can fix.

 

I worked on Welcome Center and we had a lot of people interested in what was happening in the feature (execs, etc).  But most meetings involved two or three people.  And I use the term meeting loosely.  Basically, we called each other on the phone (most calls lasted under a minute).  Initially, we had two or three meetings with most folks present but there were really only 3 people working on it (all of them part-time).  I imagine that our PM had more work to do than I did, because there was a lot more deciding what to do than deciding the best way to do it.  It's a pretty simple feature to implement.

 

So here are two examples of a simple feature: one with tons of overhead, and one that was run more efficiently.  Were the features intrinsically different?  Were the partner teams unduly burdensome?  Something else?

 

(Yes, this isn't a discussion of Agile adoption at Microsoft, I just mean agile in the general sense)