Windows SDK: Moving Up and out of Beta 2

Our Test manager Brian has a nice post up on the team blog that discusses our release process in some detail. It's definitely a timely post as this team moves towards our ZBB for Beta 2 this week and as we prep for our release cycle and what I call post-Beta 2, pre-RC1 work. The only thing I disagree with Brian about is, not surprisingly, that it's the responsibility of PMs to step out of the way while we move to ZBB. He has a Test perspective on things, but to me during the intense release cycle that PMs are very important. We need to keep the developers focused on our targets, need to be able to report up and out on bugs, and be able to escalate difficult problems if necessary.

I find this phase of the process to be the most exciting. In part that excitement comes from the fact that the process is nearly at an end and that we're approaching closure. For another, there's just more excitement in the halls as we look to put out fires, resolve open bugs, work closely between dev, test and PM to resolve issues and verify fixes. And from a personal perspective, I love being so involved in helping my team to drive to wrapping up our projects. There's a nice sense of closure, wrapping things up, moving on.

At the same time, there's a lot of looking forward to the next milestone. Setup has something like 26 items our list to tackle for RC1, which is certainly ambitious. We have three major tasks to accomplish: custom install locations, adding SQM feedback systems to setup, and componentizing the SDK into smaller chunks in the back end. Those are locked and top of the queue. Deciding where the other 23 or so items fall is also an interesting part of this phase of the process. Now is the time to rank tasks. Do we add billboards to setup at this point? If we do so, how does that rank versus making sure we install in the right registry hives on 64 bit machines versus ensuring that x86 users don't get 64-bit content. Of course, we try to get to as many of these issues as possible, but without priorities, it all ends up being a jumble. I love helping to lead the way to decide which direction to go and where we should spend our resources.