What software development process?
Posted by admin, Fri Nov 24 10:53:35 UTC 2006
moblog: The Windows Shutdown crapfest
In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository—among other problems, the infrastructure just won’t support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.
I’m feeling flabbergasted after reading this, but I don’t really know why. I mean, there had to be a reason for the general craptastic nature of Windows, but to see one of the reasons for it exposed, and it’s so… so… messy.
