Shipping Software: The End Game

As Microsoft’s products move from development to shipping, they go through a set of interim releases designed to give Microsoft feedback on their contents and quality and help customers plan for deployment. Earlier releases help determine the features and architecture of the product while later ones serve primarily to shake out bugs. Customers and partners involved in these programs must understand their purpose to avoid either wasting time by evaluating a product too soon or missing opportunities to influence design by waiting too long.

However, customers and partners should also be aware that Microsoft’s decentralized product development means there will be variations in how each product group manages its prerelease activities. This article only describes the general principles that are applied across all groups. (For a chart summarizing the prerelease stages of Microsoft software development, see “Software Prerelease At a Glance“.)

Milestones: Progress vs. Schedule

Because of the size and the complexity of the software it develops, Microsoft (like most professional developers) breaks development into a series of checkpoints known as milestones. Each milestone has a definition document that describes which features will and will not be implemented by that milestone and what the acceptable quality level for those features are.