C# this week 1/21/2005

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We had a rollicking ride this week in our PU.

Bugs once again became the name of the game. After two months of security push, we started transitioning back to bugs this week. The release team (Jay, Kartik and I) have started to do the standard swan songs for releases -

  • Define the date when we go to ask mode (when each bug to be checked in has to be approved by us),
  • Define the bar for that date.
  • Spend some time looking at members of our team who are overloaded on bugs and started to look at ways to load balance them
  • Triage bugs. Some devs have been surprised as we trooped into their offices with laptops and went over their lower priority bugs one by one. Cyrus who sits across from me, and is the recipient of a couple of bugs from "load balancing" has made clear to me how overjoyed he is with our largesse. I havent had the heart to tell him whats in store for him next week :-)

Security push was smooth for some teams, less smooth for others. We came up with some good issues to fix and team members have been working hard this week to prepare each bug with information such as cost of fix, risk, performance impact so as to justify their fix to the division. We are definitely seeing progress in this area - we did the same pushes in VS2002 and VS 2003 and its obvious the product is more solid & the team understands security more. Generally, I feel we are looking good and have a couple of small cleanup items to do.

Today is review day so all progress is slow. Scottwil and C# managers have mandated today be used to do mid year reviews. While this is a hiccup in our drive to Whidbey Beta2, this stuff is important for the development of our team. And its just a hiccup. So from noon today, I'll probably just shut my door and work on my review too.

Next week, our PM's and QA plan to go build some projects for an appweek. I'm looking forward to using the product to write cool stuff. Our long term idea is to turn these projects into samples for the community that we host on our dev center. I'm excited with some of the projects, and I'll probably blog about this more next week.

Shaykat