How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century

> Even as Microsoft stuck to its waterfalls internally, Visual Studio was used by third-party developers who themselves wanted to use agile methods, creating pressure on the Developer Division to build better support for these approaches.

These features are definitely being driven by external customers. (Disclaimer: I work on the TFS team, in particular on the Version Control team, so I can speak to the changes in version control throughout the years.)

TFS was initially conceived as a mix of the tools for software development (version control, issue tracking, continuous integration) that were heavily influenced by the tools already in use at Microsoft to build (say) Windows and Office. That's why the version control component in the first version of TFS was a checkout/edit/checkin model. Clunky, yes, but scalable to the sizes of the codebases that we wanted to support internally. That's also why the work item tracking is crazily flexible in ways that are barely comprehensible to mortals, it was meant to adapt to the different development practices that go on around these parts. So TFS 2005 looked a lot like the development tools that existed within Microsoft at the time, and it was really aimed at "influential" internal customers.

And that's great, but most of our customers outside of these walls don't have crazy multi-gigabyte source trees and the same checkout/edit/checkin model that's so useful for a code base the size of Visual Studio is an unnecessary annoyance if you've got a much smaller or more modular code base. And if you have a dodgy network connection or you travel alot, it's downright problematic. So bringing an edit/merge/commit model ("local workspaces") and a DVCS (Git) to the party were truly about growing and adapting TFS for our customers, who tend to be a little lighter weight and more agile than we are.

Here we are 10 years later ...

Getting interrupted every 15 minutes while trying to get my head wrapped around some difficult bug fixes makes work virtually impossible.

For every startup I've had, I do all my work from home in my own office. Once a day meetings to go over issues, strategy, etc. makes my days exponentially more productive.

With notebook computers and mobile phones, there is no reason to chain an employee to their desk. A software company could have areas with open tables and school desks designated for a particular working environment. It would require some sound proofed rooms meant for demos and discussions, and at least one large area you could call "The Library" where talking is met with a chorus of angry shushing.

This is just an idea that’s been rattling around my head so I am sure there are points to work out in implementation, but I doubt it would cost significantly more or hurt productivity any worse than open office plans.

OK, let's consider only compilers, if you wish..)

Btw, GNU Emacs, which is another "miracle" of software engineering, is a good-enough IDE part for Clang. Together, in pair, they are, in my opinion, even more flexible and less resourse-wasting than VS. And (surprise!) cross-platform.

In manys eyes it is quite the opposite: Netbeans and Eclipse used to run circles around VS. I understand a lot of people like VS and there have been improvements lately bur please don't spread FUD on HN. Thanks.

Or XCode, that's Apple's (free) IDE for Mac OS X

Infrequent deployments also greatly increase the risk of problems during deployment, because infrequently exercised pieces of code (i.e. The deployment code/scripts) are more likely to be buggy, and because gobs of changes pile up between deployments.

With that said, continuous deployment probably should not be happening at night or on the weekends unless you have rock-solid automatic rollback and the necessary monitoring to trigger it.

But it only works if you have the time and resources to react to what happens. For example if you find out that differences between dev and prod servers can cause problems, you could add a tool like Chef/Puppet/Ansible to prevent those differences.

But if you don't have the time or resources to invest in that sort of change (as in many government agencies), then continuous deployment will just pack more problems into a shorter period of time.

This would be analogous to lifting weights, but never getting enough sleep or good nutrition. Under those circumstances, a person will just get weaker and more injured over time.

Ditto, though we eventually adopted a modified form of scrum for the project that I'm on. Is the decision out of your control?

Life is better now I work from home. It's better to have the kids screaming in the background than people tapping your shoulder and blasting your entire thought process out of the window.

I was miserable working by myself in a private office.

(Disclaimer; Microsoft employee without a personal office, quite jealous of those with.)

So many people focus on open vs private offices and miss the whole point of which one is better for when.

Realistically, getting the choice seems to be more encouraging.

I'm, unfortunately, at an open office as a cost savings measure type place and without headphones I would get absolutely _nothing_ done.

Good for you. Not everyone can.

You can get a good 10db attenuation from just closed back headphones alone.

I've been listening to headphones all day, most days at work for 15 or so years. No hearing problems.

Well, none that can be put down to headphone use, last time I got tested apparently they found conductive hearing loss in my left ear and asked if I'd had a head injury o_O

In my experience the levels you need to drown everything out (to a manageable level and with closed headphones) is way lower for white/brown noise than it is for music.

Also, noise cancelling headphones can allow you to listen to music at quieter than the office's ambient volume.

I suspect whether one can work better with some background 'noise' (sounds and sights) is partly a personality characteristic, but that interruptions are universally disastrous when one tries to be productive.

Edit: I left Microsoft to escape the VS ship schedule, I have not heard of significant changes from the co-workers I keep in touch with.

I think it's more likely that the early adopter teams had some measurable result, and then management pushed the change through to other teams. So how did those teams react?

The article just paints a very optimistic picture. Something as big as VS, there's a lot of stuff to actually change when you go about changing things. I feel like there's just more to this story.

As for the workflow you describe being "impossible with remote communications," trust me, it's not! Just paste a screenshot into a group chat.

Often this is faster and more effective than physically showing someone a screen anyway, plus it broadcasts the info to a potentially larger group.

As for the "wait for them to notice" part, that's just bad collaboration and it happens whether people are there or not. If you're expecting your coworker to be interruptible, s/he can be whether it's IM or it's a shoulder tap if that's the expectation.

Meanwhile, in a big crowded open office plan, often times people are just as uninterruptible as remote is so often perceived to be. People put on headphones and strongly resist shoulder taps.

Whether you're all in one office or all collaborating over chat, success or failure is about proper communication, not which medium you're using.

I guess downvoters are just upset about MS criticism, rather than consider this being off-topic, since it isn't.

Only in markets with poor competition. I.e. in unhealthy markets.

MS is used to such situation, because for a long time they were in a very sick market, where they dominated heavily. Lock-in was used to preserve that domination. Now the situation has changed, and them sticking to lock-in actually harms their position more than helping them to preserve their grip on the market. They slowly realize that, but they could do it faster. Moving slowly has become their habit, exactly because of the above.

Competition does wonders. Remember the times of heavy IE lock-in tactics? They are gone because of the competition.