1. Slow Down to Go Fast:
Lessons Learned Shipping
Bing Voice Search on Xbox
James Waletzky
Director of Development & QA Practices, Crosslake
(formerly Dev Lead @ Microsoft)
jamesw@crosslaketech.com
Randy Santossio
Senior SDET, Microsoft (Xbox)
ransan@microsoft.com
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2. Who is this James guy?
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/progressive_development/
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3. The little engine that could
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4. Who is this Randy guy?
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5. From that little Redmond startup…
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6. How is your short term memory?
“Please jot down your
Dory says… questions and save
them for the end.”
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7. How to win the race
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8. A gile vs. a gile
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9. Just Bing it!
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10. The internal workings
Games Applications
Movies TV
Music Apps
bing
Voice to
Text
Controller Xbox Voice Input
Input LIVE (Kinect)
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11. Story time!
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12. Once upon a time…
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13. They lived in a world where…
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14. Boundaries existed
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15. Kick off!
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16. Their first task
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17. Best buddies?
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18. Test/Dev: Best Buddies?
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19. The buddies worked together…
Dev: Team: Dev: Team:
• sends code • reviews code • fixes found • signs off on
review changes bugs code
• builds & tests • updates code • dev checks in
new code review code
• finds new bugs
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20. They huddled every day around this archaic board
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21. Comprehensive documentation? Well, no…
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22. Many dependencies, great responsibility
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23. We used Milestones “checkpoints”
or
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24. Nobody is perfect
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25. “I got your back, Bro”
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26. What’s this about “Exit Criteria”?
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27. Reality hurts
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28. The answer? Begin with the end in mind!
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29. It’s the thought that counts
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30. Automation happens!
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31. …but we didn’t automate everything
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32. Why NOT automate everything?
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33. We all took responsibility for quality
Quality Ownership
Dev Test PM Design
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34. Working in lockstep
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35. I Unit Tests! Real, unsolicited quotes
from Xbox developers
“Unit tests flagged a
“Unit Tests make
real bug in legacy
me feel cuddly”
code that I never
would have found”
“Thinking test-first
“In God we trust.
helped me get the
Everything else we
design right the
unit test”
first time”
“Is it failing because of
a problem in the code, “My unit tests revealed a
or because I don’t subtle bug that never would
understand the code” have been found otherwise
[except potentially by the
customer]”
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36. No unit tests? You’ve got some ‘splaining to do!
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37. Bugs still happen
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38. Bugs were “bliss” to this team
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39. What should YOUR team do?
Start “by the book”, and always follow the principles, but break agile
as necessary
Form dev/test buddies early
Build quality in early – remove the walls
Collaborate in person and in writing
Create “done” definitions based on tests
Automate pragmatically, using coverage to adapt
Pay down your technical debt before it is long-term
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40. Agile 2012 Microsoft 40
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41. James Waletzky
Director of Development & QA Practices, Crosslake
(formerly Dev Lead @ Microsoft)
jamesw@crosslaketech.com
Randy Santossio
Senior SDET, Microsoft (Xbox)
ransan@microsoft.com
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