Vlad Romanenko
Program Manager, CSM
Mobile Hotmail
Microsoft Ireland

Microsoft: Move to Agile
Before
Marketing driven releases
Big feature promises up-front
Committed release date that always slipped
Now
No committed release date
Technical Community Previews (TPC)
Incorporating customer feedback
Microsoft Ireland

Agile in Microsoft?
No single methodology across company
Huge product suites – lots of
dependencies
Legacy architecture – hard to adopt new
tools
Microsoft Ireland

Windows Live Hotmail
Suite: Hotmail, Messenger, Calendar, Spaces, …
270 million users
10 000 servers
Microsoft Ireland

Hotmail Mobile
Developed in 1 year
Team: 6 people
1 program manager
3 devs
2 devs in test
Microsoft Ireland

Team roles
Scrum
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Team
Microsoft
Program Manager
Software Development Engineer
SDE in Test
Is there a match?
Microsoft Ireland

Managing requirements
Scrum
Product backlog
User stories
Microsoft
‘1 page specs’
PM Specs
Speclets – the most agile way
Design docs
Test plan
Microsoft Ireland

Planning
Release cycle is ~1 year (Windows Live)
Milestone is 3 month long (4 per release)
Mini release at the end of each milestone
Big release at the end for the whole suite
How do you run the milestone?
We tried 2 week sprints
No clear sprint boundaries
Microsoft Ireland

Daily Scrum
Effective communication tool
Each team member has individual office – no open
space
Flexible working hours – need enough overlap time
11:40-12:00 – just before lunch
Whoever is late pays 1 euro for team building (=
beer)
Weekly sync with remote teams (30 minutes)
Scrum of scrum?
Microsoft Ireland

Coding Practices
Code review – mandatory for every check-
in
Over email + In-house tool (bbpack)
Collective code ownership
Continuous integration
In-house solution
Coding standards
StyleCop / FxCop
Microsoft Ireland

Unit Tests
Not yet introduced
Legacy architecture
Web application
‘Critical mass’ is required for TDD adoption
Internal knowledge sharing – TDD seminars
Our team plans adopting TDD in coming release
Other teams already have full TDD
Microsoft Ireland

Testing methodologies
It’s mobile web!
Testing is done by Engineers
Automated functional testing (black-box)
Visual Studio Test System
Code coverage above 75%
Manual testing is required with mobile devices
Test plans are used to outsource manual testing
Microsoft Ireland

Tools
In-house web based
Poor support, deprecated
Excel – simple
RallyDev – costly for big teams
Future is…
Team Foundation Server + MS Project
Integrated solution
Microsoft Ireland

Usage for Agile Practices
Microsoft Ireland

Team Attitudes
Microsoft Ireland

Vlad.Romanenko@microsoft.com
Microsoft Ireland