Microsoft's New Office Rules

"Even as Microsoft prepares to launch Office 2003 this fall, it is readying a new quality-first development process for Office 12.

The company is stepping up its quality assurance, stressing a new goal, called Milestone Q, of getting code clean and solid earlier in the development process, according to a Microsoft internal memo examined by CRN. Toward that end, the company will use more automated quality-assurance and testing tools such as Big Button and Buddy Web. Office 12 is also known internally as the Longhorn version of Office.

In the current Office development workflow, if a developer thinks a feature is done, he checks it into the system,often before his program manager or testers have worked with it. Going forward, the developer, tester and program manager all will work on the code before it is checked into the main source branch. Theoretically, that means it will be immediately ready for internal testing, also known as 'dogfooding.' "

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