Still, lets not go overboard. The mythical man month effect can be avoided in part, if those folks are distributed in lots of little teams of 4 or 5 people doing individual device drivers and so forth. Windows still has a lot of very discrete components.
Good point. However, if, say, 5 million lines of NT 4.0 was small device driver code modules, I fail to see how there would be more than, say, 10 million lines of small device driver code modules in NT 5.0. The number of devices hasn't grown that much in the last year or so. That still leaves 25 million lines of code to account for.
Besides, they're doing a Directory. The whole point of NT 5 is integration. I realize I'm using a somewhat different form of the word integration, but there is overlap in that high level features of seperate modules rely on each other in an integrated system even if specific code doesn't at a very low level. If my privileges on a system rely on some information on another computer somewhere, then both have to work as well as everything in between.
Anyway, the proof is in the pudding. They're building a directory from scratch, they're late, they're always late, this is bigger than anything they've done before, yada yada yada blah blah blah they're up the creek without a paddle. |
