How Microsoft Keeps Windows 7 Development Under ControlHow Microsoft Keeps Windows 7 Development Under Control

For months and months, Microsoft kept silent about Windows 7.

After a limited demo last May, the first public comments started trickling out last August in Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 blog, and the floodgates opened by the end of October at the company's Professional Developers Conference. It's all been part of the plan, and a far cry from how Microsoft handled Windows Vista before its release.

Windows boss Steven Sinofsky is known for his controlled, on-time delivery of products, most notably the well-received Office 2007 suite. His strategy has been hypercontrolled this time around. While a number of prerelease builds have leaked, Windows 7 hasn't been the start-and-stop, leak-heavy development cycle that Windows Vista was. That even caused some consternation among interested customers early in the process, as public information on Windows 7 was so sparse.

"With Windows Vista, even before we wrote the code, people were talking about features," Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's senior director of Windows client product management for enterprise customers, said in an interview. Leaks were rampant, uncontrolled, and unsubstantiated. Features would be discussed and never heard from again. Not this time, Schuster insisted.

With Windows 7, Schuster said, Microsoft decided that it wouldn't disclose features publicly before it was "very clear" on whether the feature would be in the operating system and what it would look like. It also created a firm release timeframe -- about three years after the Vista release -- and decided to stick with it so that unlike Vista, Windows 7 wouldn't come five years after the previous Windows edition.

Even the development of features has taken on a new look with Windows 7, as Microsoft has engaged customers and partners more deeply than in previous releases, looking at more data than it ever has before. For example, with Windows 7, Microsoft spent six months looking at computing trends before writing any code. That included extensive qualitative and quantitative research.

Microsoft has talked to about 4,000 enterprise customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Russia, India, and China in a series of surveys done over time, finding risk management, compliance, and mobility as their top issues. Among the top desires: 56% said they needed help securing laptops, 61% wanted help preventing installation of unauthorized applications, and 59% wanted to make it easier for remote workers to access corporate information. That research has been more extensive and more global than the surveys Microsoft carried out before Vista.

The qualitative research Microsoft performed before Windows 7 has been even broader than the quantitative research. Key business customers -- 27 of them, to be exact -- were brought into the development process as early as the planning phase in Microsoft's Desktop Advisory Council to do briefings. This type of engagement epitomizes the control Microsoft has asserted over Windows 7 disclosure.

During these meetings, Microsoft required that the people who attended were always the same people, so that Microsoft could track leaks if anything was being said outside the groups. Attendees signed nondisclosure agreements, and unlike during previous release cycles, weren't allowed to walk away from the meetings with PowerPoint slides.

"We didn't even go out and talk to our field sales or even to our executives, but instead to specific partners or customers with specific issues we wanted to talk about," Schuster said. That's right, even some Microsoft executives didn't have much insight into Windows 7 -- the public wasn't alone.

Device and computer manufacturers had similar access.

Some software companies had early access to development toolkits and to a lab set up running early test versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Already, Microsoft said, more than 50 companies are testing out Windows 7 exclusively for marketing purposes in what Microsoft is calling its First Wave program, and that pool represents companies that Microsoft will likely roll out to the press as case studies when Windows 7 is finally released.

Testing also has changed significantly. With the increasing improvement of telemetry Microsoft has put into Windows, including features like Windows Error Reporting, Microsoft has much more data than it ever has before on exactly how Windows works, and has used that data to change the development process and the way it engages partners.

For example, Vista telemetry taught Microsoft that 18% of application compatibility problems upon Vista's release were simply installer failures caused because third-party software vendors checked to make sure the installed Windows version was 5.xx, but Vista was 6.0. In most cases, the software would have worked fine, but the version check got in the way.

"Issues like that are so small but so powerful," Schuster said.

In response, Microsoft set Windows 7's version to 6.1 and is advising software vendors to set version checks to something like "greater than 6.xx" for future releases.

Microsoft also has added many instances of Windows 7 to its automated performance testing. So far, Microsoft has done more than 1 million hours of automated performance testing, generating more than 200 TB of "performance tracers" along the way to analyze and work on performance in Windows 7. That's a huge amount of available performance data compared to previous versions of Windows.

While the overhauled development process seems to have worked so far -- many early reviews of Windows 7 are positive -- the true test won't come for another several months when Microsoft finally releases the latest version of its flagship operating system.

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