Microsoft Lauds 'Scrum' Method for Software Projects
Key Excerpt:
David Treadwell, corporate vice president of the .Net Developer Platform group at Microsoft, said that while Microsoft welcomes the use of methodologies like Scrum, "we're not mandating them, but we're encouraging them. So Scrum is one process—the idea that teams meet once a day for half an hour, figure out what they're going to do then go off and do their work very quickly.
"The other is extreme programming—the concept where you might have two people working on a given piece of code and the idea is that two minds are better than one. Because you can find problems faster."
Treadwell said many teams within Microsoft rely on Scrum as a way to turn out quality software on time and in tune with user requirements.
Yet, "one thing we find is that you can't excessively mandate software development processes on a broad scale," Treadwell said.
"It's most important to mandate levels of quality. You have to give teams some flexibility to achieve those results as is most effective for those teams."
Indeed, "There are a lot of things going on," at Microsoft on this task, Treadwell said. "We have realized inside Microsoft over the years that software practices we used in the mid-90s don't scale to the size of problems that we're tackling today.
"And we made some assumptions around the turn of the century that those processes would scale up and result in certain time frames that we would be able to ship software.
"And what happened is as the projects got larger and larger, we introduced too many complex interdependencies on early software, more so than we could really digest throughout the system," said Treadwell.