The Mother of All Software Projects
Microsoft's Windows 2000 program is big. Really big. And it has problems to match
Business Week Online
Welcome to the software factory. Here, in buildings 9, 10, 26, 27, and 28 on Microsoft Corp.'s sprawling Redmond (Wash.) campus, the company's mammoth Windows 2000 operating system is assembled and torn apart once every 24 hours.
The ''daily build'' begins at 6 p.m. That's when engineering managers gather all of the new features and bug fixes that thousands of programmers produced during the day and bolt them together like so many auto parts. Twelve hours later--if all goes well--the build is done and quality assurance technicians take over. They test the code on 200 computers and ferret out anywhere from 250 to 400 new bugs. ''Triage'' teams comb over the bug reports and dole out assignments. Programmers type away all day in their rabbit-warren offices. Then, at 6 p.m., the whole process begins again.
It's a factory-style process, but this is no widget plant. With 30 million lines of code, Windows 2000 is by far the largest and most
complicated commercial software project ever undertaken--dwarfing even IBM's mainframe software. Microsoft's goal: to produce the first operating system that runs everything from laptops to ''dumb'' terminals to huge back-office computers. To accomplish this, it's welding in pieces of software that rivals treat as separate programs.
And because the process has been under way for so long--since 1995--the design goals have shifted. Customers are demanding
Internet-style software and more simplicity, adding to the time it takes to get it done. ''This is a monumental project,'' says analyst
Jon Oltsik of market researcher Forrester Research Inc. ''It's the Panama Canal of software--but the oceans keep shifting on either
side, too.''
To Microsoft's critics, Win2000 is the ultimate act of hubris by a company they would like to see fall flat on its face. ''It's a
cancerous growth of code,'' scoffs William N. Joy, a top scientist at Sun Microsystems Inc., whose Solaris operating system is about one-third as large. Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux freeware operating system, calls the making of Win2000 ''witchcraft''
and predicts Microsoft will have to lop off some features if it ever hopes to get the product out the door.
Microsoft's top engineers are growing accustomed to the sniping. Their response: a prickly we'll-show-'em attitude. ''We just keep focused on customers and quality, no matter what stones are thrown,'' snaps James E. Allchin, the senior vice-president in charge of Windows products. Still, Allchin admits that building Windows 2000 has been a soul-wrenching experience. ''One day I can be horribly depressed, and the next day we'll be in the clear again,'' he says.
APRIL DEADLINE. The long and winding road has taken a toll. Moshe T. Dunie, a vice-president who had led the core engineering team, left on an unscheduled sabbatical in mid-December. ''He had been building Windows full-time for 12 years,'' explains Mike Nash, marketing director for server products. ''When you miss your kid's 12th piano recital in a row, you know you need a breather.''
But there's no rest for the remainder of Microsoft's army of engineers. Dunie's replacement, Brian Valentine, 39, is a hard-driving
individual who earned his reputation as a closer by delivering the company's hot-selling Exchange corporate E-mail package three years ago. He has set an ambitious deadline of Apr. 21 for releasing the third and final Win2000 test version to more than 250,000 testers worldwide. Feb. 15 is lock-down day: After that, no new features are to be added. ''The only way you ever stop is you stop changing the code,'' he says.
Valentine has had no problem getting fired up for the job. He grew up poor in the sleepy town of Centralia, Wash. ''I have a nice
perspective on what it means to be in charge of the most important project in the history of mankind,'' he says. With that kind of
hyperbole at his command, it's no wonder Valentine has been able to get the rest of the crew pumped up--again. They had fallen into a morale slump in the autumn after working overtime to release the second test version last August. Two weeks after Valentine took the job, on Dec. 22, he assembled 3,000 engineers in the cavernous cafeteria of building 26 and delivered an old-fashioned halftime rant.
WORKING HOLIDAY. It was nothing fancy. He laid out his 10 rules for success (Rule 1: Make decisions in 10 minutes) and his six rules for completing projects (Rule 1: Get into lock-down A.S.A.P.). He told them they were crossing the chasm from the design phase to release. And he told them how important the project is to Microsoft. The reaction? Cheers. Hundreds volunteered to work during the traditional one-week Christmas shutdown. ''For him it was something new and exciting, and that kind of energy spreads,'' says Frank Artale, one of the engineering managers.
What's next? The grueling task of trying to make all the pieces of Win2000 work together, then work with the payroll, sales automation, and myriad other applications that customers are already using on thousands of different computers and peripheral devices. But quality isn't Microsoft's strong suit, according to Bruce M. Brown, who heads BugNet, an online service that tracks software bugs and their fixes. In the past, users have tagged bugs in the various versions of Windows faster than Microsoft could fix them.
Microsoft is intent on improving quality. Today it employs one tester for every programmer, up about 30% from the mid-'90s. And it's enlisting the help of customers to ensure that this product doesn't deliver another blow to its already poor reputation. Under the
so-called Rapid Deployment Program, 40 companies, including Merrill Lynch & Co. and Ernst & Young, test updates of Win2000 once a month and keep in touch with Microsoft daily via E-mail and phone. When the time comes, the companies get to vote on whether Microsoft sends out the third test version. ''If they can't deploy, there is no way we ship it,'' says Valentine.
So far, Microsoft's rapid-deployment partners seem to be satisfied with its progress. ''I haven't seen anything break the system,''
says John Parkinson, chief technologist at Ernst & Young. Merrill Lynch has found plenty of bugs--but no major design flaws. Still, even these allies are concerned about whether Microsoft will be able to make all of its features work well enough to be included in the final product. Last summer, when test version two shipped, there were big pieces missing. ''There may not be enough software hours in a day to make it all work together,'' frets Gregor S. Bailar, chief information officer for the National Association of Securities Dealers, another tester.
BEATING BUGS. That's a funny thing about software. The more code you produce, the more bugs you get--typically at least five per thousand lines of code. So the solution isn't just throwing more people at the problem. Even Microsoft's Allchin admits: ''We're on a treadmill.'' But Microsoft claims it's making progress. Artale says the number of Win2000 bugs wiped out in a day recently exceeded the tally of new bugs.
When will Windows 2000 finally ship? That's hard to predict. With such a complicated project, you never know when you'll run into a ''show-stopper'' that throws the schedule off. Microsoft is only saying it expects the big event to come before the end of the year. The pressure to deliver is intense--both internally and from customers. Valentine says he gets half a dozen E-mails a day from Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates III. But the core message is always the same: Don't ship Windows 2000 before its time. As the months go by, though, that may turn out to be a difficult order for Valentine to carry out.
By Steve Hamm in Redmond, Wash., with Otis Port in New York |
