Microsoft's Guest Lecturer

We had a guest lecturer from Microsoft in the last session of our Modern Methods in Software Engineering Course. It was interesting, the way they proudly present their methodology, and with no regret, confess that they have criteria like having a release in the specified time not to loose the market with price of covering up bugs and security holes just to make the release possible and leaving out quality and functionality and security issues; in brief, the fact that their priority in selecting features and and planning and everything is to maximize the profit! Well, after all they are a company with only one aim, making more money, and they were not any shy to announce that!

To be fair, I should mention that he showed us a neat pyramid shape one with security and quality and features and something else I forgot, on its sides and he said they try to extend the software while maintaining this shape balanced and everything, but eventually in the end, he confessed that everything is prioritized when having a release becomes more important than patching known bugs!

The issue of open source was also brought up at the end of his presentation by a question from the students and he calmly said they would be happy to move to open source _iff_ it would bring them more profit!

Interesting things for me to know were that they are using a tailored Agile method for most of their software development processes (e.g. for development of windows and office) and that Bill Gates is quite fund of the Cowboy Coding! It was also mentioned that Gates has recently handed over the position of chief software architect to a person (Ray Ozzie I think) who is much more process oriented, so the Microsoft guy was hopeful that they will see more practice of software engineering processes in Microsoft in the future.

BTW, KTH students can get a license for most of the MS software like Windows and Visual Studio etc. free of charge! That is while we are students.