Thursday, December 27, 2018

Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0 Postmortem

Opus Development Postmortem (PDF, via Hacker News):

In the summer of 1989, at a point where it seemed we might never converge, a program emphasizing quality of changes instead of quantity of changes was instituted. This program included code reviews and code ownership as well as a series of reminders and discussions to encourage people to think about and to be careful with the changes they made. This program was an attempt to instill some of the methods of zero-defects into a project that had gone a long time using an infinite-defects methodology and was too far in its development to consider starting from scratch.

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The interesting thing shown by these charts is that at no time did testing find significantly more bugs than development was fixing. Yet the small difference in the find rate and fix rate caused the bug list to skyrocket[…]

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During the entire period from December 1987 until September 1989 we estimated that we were between three and six months of shipping.

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[…] This is interesting reading, the postmortem on Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0. […]

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