MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

Adam — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:02:00 GMT

Just when is the blogging unreality field going to wear off? Status of internal projects may represent competitive information, may have legal consequences to contracts, expose security bugs before the fixes are deployed, and may represent excessive transparency.

I work on something inside MSFT that would sink existing product lines. Should i post our build status information? <absolutely not>

Next they'll want us to start publishing checkin mail?

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

josh ledgard — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:11:00 GMT

Adam: I agree that there will always be a need for a "Black Box" of information that customers (or at least the general public) do not need, nor should they, have access to. I think that's why the quote suggests this only for "public" products. Maybe MVPs should have a smaller black box than the general public.

So maybe for your team only a small set of MVPs or partner customers have access to this information. Then, when your product is publicly announced you have a set of customers who have been with you from the beginning that can help you evangelize and form the public community. Then you could post the information publicly.

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

josh ledgard — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:12:00 GMT

Adam: Feel free to contact me internally and we can discuss this further if you like. :-)

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

Sorin Dolha (MCSD .NET) — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 08:52:00 GMT

Josh and Adam,

I agree with both of you. I think transpacency is a very good thing for both Microsoft and their customers (be them application developers, IT staff, or end users). However, every person that is bringing such transparency SHOULD verify that he or she is allowed to expose the information publicly or not, within the legal, contractual, or competitive guidelines that the team he or she works in has.

Transparency is good and brings a lot of benefits, but you have to be very responsable about what you're making public and what not.

However, Microsoft is made up of intelligent people (at least all the people I know from within Microsoft are so), and intelligent people can be very responsable, so I don't fear about things like information leaks through blogs or so... Am I right?

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

josh ledgard — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 16:04:00 GMT

Sorin: Agreed. I wouldn't advocate people on teams doing this without first checking if they should or if they might be giving away information they shouldn't. (Hence why you see Alex carefull not to give away too many details about partners and company names. )

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

AKipman's MSBuild blog — Sat, 19 Jun 2004 20:25:00 GMT

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

AKipman's MSBuild blog — Sat, 19 Jun 2004 20:34:00 GMT

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

Adam — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 16:04:00 GMT

[i notice i've included someone else's proposal to include checkin mail in this comment]

Where this logic breaks down is as follows:

* I'm on a project > 2000 people. Because of the size and complexity of our project, most individuals have a really limited view as to what information is public and what information is not.

* Distributing responsibility to this many people pretty much ensures that someone will screw up. The percentages are against us.

* Taking things that are considered internal communication and making them public interferes with there internal value. I don't want people gathering up checkins so they can checkin a FEATURE that can be publically acknowledged rather than fixing bugs.

* I'm concerned about making everything about the external exposure. We need to fix bugs, we shouldn't be thinking about how pretty the checkin mail, whether it has enough context for the external user, etc. I'm also concerned that this again prioritizes features over fixing bugs.

Distributed responsibility is not realistic. Individual developers just can't be that well informed on a project this size, internal communication shouldn't be burned with the assumption that it will become external communication, and this level of transparency assumes a competitive/regulatory/legal landscape that my group doesn't operate in.

re: MSBuild Team Posts Status Publicly

jledgard — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:14:00 GMT

Alex has a responce to your comments posted on his blog. I'm not sure i would add anything to it.