In case you didnt see it, Luca has posted on our PDC sessions. Lots of cool new language stuff...

http://blogs.msdn.com/lucabol/archive/2005/07/14/438824.aspx

Short status today...

These last two weeks have been a whirlwind ride for our team. We made a huge dent in our bugs to hit our goals for last week. We incentivized the dev team with late night dinners and they pulled through magnificently, fixing a high number of bugs. We feel good about the bugs and more back on track. We are tracking our bugs today to make sure we hit another goal, but so far its looking good.

I've also started thinking about shutdown procedures. There are two models I know of that teams use as you shut down a product and have escalating bars. The first is the distributed triage system - each team does its first level fo triage, then brings the bugs it wants to have fixed to a higher committee where approval is given. The other model is the one triage team model - one group meets daily and triages all the bugs and listens to teams as they bring back bugs for checkins. The second is better around maintaining a steady triage bar, the first better for team decision making. C# is probably going to do the distributed triage system as we shut down, but I'm still enjoying thinking through the pros and cons of each.

Summer has hit hard here, and its been pretty hot. I live near a lake and going swimming in the evenings has become a great rather than an adventure in hypothermia.

Tech Ed is coming up. Many PM's are preparing presentations and doing dry runs on our team.

Enjoy the memorial day weekend!

So my name tends to be unusual for most people. Shaykat. Its tough for people to pronounce initially (say Share-cut, then repeat but drop the r). However I've noticed an unusual trend recently. People in email type my name as Skaykat. Why?

The keyboard keys between h and k are a little close but its not clear to me that its just a typing error. I wonder if its because people are focusing on saying the k in my name that they jumble it when typing. Anyone got a good suggestion/reason why this could happen?

Shaykat

Wowie zowie, what a fun week we have ahead of us.

Yesterday, our release folks came to a collective decision that yes, we are slightly off track on our bug goals - enough to be a concern but not alarming. We sat around & discussed corrective measures. Our conclusion was that we were going to bring in dinners for the team this week to encourage them to fix that extra bug & encourage the team to start focusing on bug fixing as much as possible. The dev team also planned to do some load balancing which helped the situation. The results for the last two days have been great - our bug checkins have gone up and we are doing a much better job on our bugs.

We also have a goal to catch up on our Priority 1 bugs every Friday - all those bugs opened before the Wednesday. We came close last week, and we plan to hit it again this Friday. QA also caught up on our resolved bug backlog and either closed them once they verified the bug had been fixed, or reactivated them.

The PM team is working this week on reviewing docs. We've assigned about 240 topics among us and spend time this week reviewing topics in our docs like "How do I do debugging". We are uncovering some good bugs on the content and the help experience as we go along. If you happen to have comments or concerns around the documentation or help in the Beta2 product, please comment or file bugs!

We are spending a good amount of time working on Tech Ed Presentations among the team - half the team has a presentation coming up soon.

Shaykat

C# status skipped a week last week. Sorry about that. Mon and Tues of last week, we had the C# Strategic Design Review (SDR), where we bring in a couple of customers from different parts of the industry and show them general ideas about where we want to go with our future products. Then we note down their feedback and try to incorporate it into the product. This is a good way to make sure we are solving customer problems and last weeks feedback was good. It was also good to hear our customers tell us about problems they run into and have our entire team be there to listen to it, rather than just the PM's or the managers.

Last week was a short week for most of us too, as we got Friday off as a reward for shipping Beta2. It was a much welcome break for me - I find myself feeling pretty refreshed and good to go this week when last week I felt out of touch. I was a little sick too which didnt help the cause much.

Jay set up an excellent meeting today - we discussed our bug counts which are slightly over where our weekly goals are. Our weekly goals if plotted on a chart would show a steep slope that flattens out. We are still in the steep part and a little over and so we had a quick tete a tete with our plans and where we were. The net result was that the team that was over had a couple of big issues to tackle the last couple of weeks and wanted the next two weeks to target their goals. We felt this was reasonable and are going to wait and see how they go. But over the next week or two we will be watching the bug counts like hawks.

We also raise the bars on bugs this week by planning from this Friday on our team hits zero Pri1 bugs. This ensures that the high impact bugs are fixed and kept low until we ship this product. Also we plan to have 0 Pri1 bugs that have been resolved by developers but unverified that they have actually been fixed by developers. That means every Friday all Pri1 bugs that have been resolved will have been checked to have been fixed or reactivated.

Last week, one of the issues we worried about with the Beta2 release was you experience if you installed Beta2 on a machine that had Beta1. A clean uninstall of Beta1 makes Beta2 work much better...the steps are here. Additional troubleshooting links can be found on the post here.

Do you have non schedule related questions about our process? Let me know!

Shaykat