Engineering Excellence and TrustWorthy Computing

For the last several years, Microsoft has had days devoted to Engineering Excellence (EE), and to TrustWorthy Computing (TWC). Much of EE days in the last couple years have been about pushing quality upstream, which I interpret as getting more testing done sooner in the process,  whether it is design reviews, code reviews, or unit testing, but ultimately before code is checked in. TWC has been about the pillars of privacy, security, reliability, business process integrity and transparency.

This year, they combined the two events into a single 3 day event, with dozens of in depth talks on a broad range of subjects related to EE and TWC. You can learn more about TWC here.

The keynotes were good, and the final keynote was by SteveB, who was as fun and spontaneous as ever. It is amazing to see how far we've come as a company with regards to these two key initiatives in just 3 years.

The most interesting thing I saw today was on Team Software Process (TSP) and Personal Software Process (PSP) that the BUIT has been using with good results. I am going to read a couple of Watts S. Humphrey's books on this and see if we can apply it to what my team is doing. More importantly, it got me to think about what we are measuring with regards to productivity (lines of code written) and defects injected. There was a quote used, something along the lines of "If you aren't measuring, you aren't engineering. I don't know what it is, but it is not engineering." If anyone knows the source of the quote, and the exact quote, please let me know.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2006
  This week marks the end of a very busy month or so, which started with a number of big annual project...
• Anonymous
  January 21, 2008
  Earlier this month, I was reading the Open Solutions Alliance's top predictions for 2008....this was based on polling they conducted within their membership base. It's a good read and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys that kind of fodder (there's no