Microsoft's New Office Rules

The company is stepping up its quality assurance, stressing a new goal, called Milestone Q, of getting code clean and solid earlier in the development process, according to a Microsoft internal memo examined by CRN. Toward that end, the company will use more automated quality-assurance and testing tools such as Big Button and Buddy Web. Office 12 is also known internally as the Longhorn version of Office.

In the current Office development workflow, if a developer thinks a feature is done, he checks it into the system,often before his program manager or testers have worked with it. Going forward, the developer, tester and program manager all will work on the code before it is checked into the main source branch. Theoretically, that means it will be immediately ready for internal testing, also known as "dogfooding."

One solution provider, who requested anonymity, was glad to hear Microsoft is upping the ante on quality, "but this sort of begs the question with what happened in previous versions of Office."

Office, which has an estimated 90 percent of corporate desktops, is often beta-tested by solution providers.

Software development, especially for a product as feature-rich as Office, is a repetitive process comprising what can seem to be endless feedback loops and rework.

"We're trying to reduce the iteration of that cycle because it's extremely costly," said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Product Group. "We want to use our development resources more effectively, yielding higher-quality code and not iterating what customers never see," he said.

The Office 12 team will rely on new tools, including Buddy Web, a system developers can use to privately share releases, according to the memo, from Eric Fox, Office development manager at Microsoft. Buddy Web had previously been used by the Outlook team.

In addition, the Office group will have access to Big Button, a system that gives developers easy access to the appropriate set of tests for their code.

Automation has become a bigger factor in both internal and external testing. The use of the Watson tool in Office 2003 development led to more complete testing,including an additional beta round,and what Microsoft says is much better code. Watson automates the near-instantaneous transmission of crash reports and data to Microsoft over the Web.

Another tool, dubbed Service Quality Monitor (SQM), will also be used more widely. Watson reports system information about crash-related events, "where you were in the code, what was the state of Intel registers and key memory variables," Sinofsky said. "SQM, - pronounced 'skwim'- informs us of a sequence of events: 'Here you started Outlook, wrote a message, moved a message to the folder.' Each of these little pieces of data are piled up and sent occasionally, and we look at that data in aggregate."

The use of SQM and Watson is voluntary and anonymous, he added.