It's crunch time here in MDB (Mail Desktop Beta, our unofficial acronym to keep it short and sweet). The developers are working hard on last minute DCRs and coding like maniacs to lower our bug count, testers are running through a multi-week test pass and buddy tests, and program managers are fighting hard in war meetings and clearing road blocks. What are all these things? I'll explain in a minute. But first, Why ARE we working so hard? That's because our first managed beta starts today! Are you part of the managed beta? "~100 beta members will be sent a survey link starting Wednesday, with feedback collected over the next 7 days. If this 100-group has a good beta experience, the group will be expanded to around 5000 within the next few weeks." - Bradley, our test lead. We're keeping the group small for this beta so the feedback loop will be tight.  If you made the list, congrats! If you didn't, don't despair, the next round of beta is only a few months away. That beta will include a MUCH larger test audience. When it comes time for the beta test to start, look for our post here for directions on how to sign up. That's our big news but you're probably wondering what we're doing in the mean time to get the product ready for you. So here’s the dirt. The product team is generally divided into a few major sections (in no particular order of importance):

 

Developers - These are the coders and keepers of the algorithm. No body knows the features in more detail then these people.  Devs, such as Andy, are working on DCRs (design change requests) at the moment, these are last minute changes to the graphical interface before we totally lock down the user interface and focus on bug fixing. When the devs finish their code, they must past on the changes to a tester.

 

Testers - We're responsible for the quality of product. One of the things we do are buddy tests. Across Microsoft we have ways to methodically ship high quality software.  We have a second dev code review every change to be made.  Then the test team will test that change before it is added to our code base. We're currently running through a test pass as well. During the test pass, we try to scan and scrub every inch of code to ensure we catch all the bugs and pass that information on to the developer and program manager. Oh yeah, we write a ton of test automation tools to make our job easier.

 

Program Managers (PMs) - These are the wonderful people that orchestrate the features and make sure the feature is developed on schedule and without any road blocks. People like Vlada go to "war" on a regular basis to fight for quality. War meetings occur on a weekly basis. Feature representatives and leads have to decide, based on the schedule, which new features and code changes can be made and which has to be postponed. War is a place for difficult product wide decisions, and its brutal for everyone. But if we are to deliver a well rounded product to you guys on time, we just have to make a few sacrifices.

 

International: These guys make sure our products are localized and globalized for international release. They ensure every string is correct in every language we ship to and every feature works the same way whether you’re reading Chinese or Cyrillic.

 

CDC: Our design and usability group helps us design the interface so it's intuitive and looks cool. If a button is misplaced or an dialog doesn't make sense, these are the guys that help us redesign it.

 

User Assistance: We may be masters of C++, but we're not pros at the English language. The UA group comes in and helps us reword our dialogs and write the help file so everything is easy to understand.

Oh yeah, there's also daily triage. This is where developers, testers, program managers, and international decide the responsibility and priority of bugs. Bugs that cause crashes or compromise data integrity raise huge red flags and are addressed first. Smaller cosmetic bugs that aren't seen often are saved until later.
 

And there you have it folks, the inner works our group. Now, if you don't mind, I'll need to get back to this photo mail DCR buddy test for Azmy. Be sure to look for a post by Vlada later this week on the photo mail feature.

 

Until next time,

-Lei Gong