C# Status: 3/24/2005

Our bug counts finally dropped off in Beta2 and we hit a big 0 today. Jay has been ecstatic all day - if he could I bet he'd have one of those buttons you pin to your lapel and it would say "Ask me what our bug count in Beta2 is today!". We've had a couple of small issues that needed minding to this week, and Jay has been cleaning up magnificently. Nothing massive has crashed and my hair is slowly returning to its normal color from grey.

 

Our teams are busy gearing up for the next milestone and it’s a hectic time. We have to schedule time for a bunch of activities. Our dev team scheduled time to write checkin tests, backport fixes from the Beta2 source tree to the RTM source tree, run QA regression suites and yes, fix bugs. They've been executing on this all week.

 

I happened to spend some time looking ahead at the PM work calendar and man was it packed.

We are trying to get our bugs down to zero by this Friday, so that Dev has a better idea of whats sitting on their plate.  We are also scrambling around to make sure large design changes are accounted for and are scheduled to happen. This is a little difficult as we have to coordinate some of this work with other teams, who are on slightly different schedules than us. So that has been stressful.

 

On top of that our team looks to have monthly community goals - answer newsgroups, blog, write content etc etc. That will be coming up and we will be having a big quarterly review around that next month so that takes some planning. We like having quarterly reviews with our management on this as it helps us to buckle down and hit goals we have internally for community.

 

Next month we also have a design review with a couple of architects etc from outside Microsoft. We will present them with ideas of where we are going with the language and tools and then push their feedback back into the product. This early feedback in the design cycle is something we like to do to make great products.

 

And lastly our QA team has been busy with signoffs - this requires running and analysing automated tests, making sure the localized products are ok, etc etc. Its busy around here.

 

Shaykat