Microsoft Engineering Stories – How We Build Software at Microsoft

Ed Blankenship

May 13th, 20140 0

Before I joined Microsoft, I worked with many companies over many years helping them with transforming & improving their application lifecycle management practices. I was also very fortunate to have been awarded as a Microsoft MVP for many of those years and had the opportunity to interact closely with the ALM Tools product teams where I’m now a team member. In my consulting engagements with customers, especially with the larger enterprises, I noticed a particular pattern: the problems that software teams face are the same as the software engineering problems that are being tackled at Microsoft. Ever since I have joined Microsoft, the similarities have become even more apparent.

We would like to begin sharing those stories across the product teams at Microsoft about the challenges we have been facing and to let you know about our journeys in tackling them – – accomplishments, blemishes, and all – in our new series: Microsoft Engineering Stories. The software engineering challenges we face each day are particularly interesting at the scale of our software development. We hope that you like them and take something away that helps you as you solve similar challenges. We’ll keep you up to date on our progress each of the problems our teams and you face are constantly changing and we are all continuing learning on how to build software even better.

Scaling Agile

Our first pilot story, Scaling Agile Across the Enterprise, talks about our journey in Developer Division from a three-year release cycle with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server to a three-week release cycle that you have been seeing lately. It’s been a very popular topic especially as you have started to see our progress in continually shipping out new value in updates & major releases as well as with Visual Studio Online in our frequent cloud cadence. Along with the story we have nine mini-videos that allow you to “watch” the story as well so I encourage you to look through the ones that are interesting to you. Brian Harry kicks us off with a historical view of how he has seen software being developed throughout his career.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think! Let us know what other stories will be interesting to you as well across our teams at Microsoft!