I am excited to announce that as of 6pm, Nov 19, the Developer Division hit the ‘Zero Bug Bounce’ (ZBB) milestone for Beta2 of Visual Studio 2005. This is one of the key milestones on the way to a major product milestone like a Beta or the final release of a product where we have eliminated our bug backlog and the development team is handling bugs that are coming in real-time.
The team worked very hard to help us reach this milestone. Ever since we shipped Beta1 earlier this year Summer, we have consistently focused on improving the quality of the product by fixing bugs, doing a limited number of work items (also known as Design Change Requests or DCRs) based on customer feedback, being selective about what we deferred to the Release Candidate (RC) milestone and not postponing or deferring chunks of bugs/issues to post Visual Studio 2005. During the 5 month push to the ZBB milestone, the team has done a tremendous job fixing bugs. At the same time, they managed to keep the RC milestone bug backlog to the bug caps we had originally set and eliminated much of our bug backlog.
Looking ahead, we are entering the most important phase of the Whidbey product cycle, the Security Push. By now, we all understand the impact of a security vulnerability issue in a shipping product for our customers and for us. Over the course of the next four weeks, we will focus on the security push, do the due diligence and ensure that we produce the most secure versions of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio ever. We have a lot of work to do – threat models, code reviews, annotations, and penetration testing to name a few, all to ensure that our customers can be confident trusting their mission critical applications and businesses to our platform and tools. Please note that though we think about security during the entire lifecycle of the product, each product does go through a concentrated security push milestone to ensure that we have done our absolute best.
We are on target to deliver the most compelling Visual Studio ever.
Namaste!