Microsoft reorganizes teams to speed up Windows 10 development

Martin Brinkmann
Dec 22, 2019
Windows, Windows 10
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39

Microsoft adjusted the development cycle of the company's Windows 10 operating system to the development cycle of Microsoft Azure; the change explains the longer development period of Windows 10 2004, the next feature update version of the operating system.

Azure updates are released in the second and fourth quarter of each year, and the decision was made to adapt Windows updates, which were historically released in the first and third quarter, to the development cycle.

The company made other changes in recent time. It dropped the Skip Ahead ring entirely and made the Fast Ring the cutting edge development channel. Features get introduced into the Fast Ring earlier than before now and they are no longer linked to a particular version of the Windows 10 operating system. One interesting effect of the change is that it is now possible to push features into release versions of Windows 10 after they have been tested in the Insider Rings.

Microsoft appears to have separated development teams as well in order for changes to be pushed more quickly to Windows 10 devices. A recent observation by Twitter user Walking Cat suggests that Microsoft may have split the development team into a CoreOS team and a Shell Experience team.

windows 10 feature experience pack

The CoreOS team follows the Azure development cycle while the Shell Experience team may push out changes to Windows independently of feature update releases. The change makes a lot of sense considering that it gives Microsoft more flexibility when it comes to the introduction of new features. Instead of having to wait for the next feature update release, Microsoft could push out new features at any time it wants to any version of Windows 10 it wants under the new structure.

Another indicator for that is the release of the new Windows Feature Experience Pack. The version is now highlighted in the latest Insider builds under About in the Settings. While the app does nothing obvious at this point, it may be used in the future by Microsoft to push new features and updates to the system independently of regular updates.

Closing words

Microsoft used the year to reorganize Windows 10 development. It is now in a position to test and release features and feature updates independently of releases of new feature update versions of Windows 10. (via Deskmodder)

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Microsoft reorganizes teams to speed up Windows 10 development
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Microsoft reorganizes teams to speed up Windows 10 development
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Microsoft adjusted the development cycle of the company's Windows 10 operating system to the development cycle of Microsoft Azure; the change explains the longer development period of Windows 10 2004, the next feature update version of the operating system.
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. BETAsEternal said on December 26, 2019 at 7:15 pm
    Reply

    Windows 10 does not actually have any end users as it’s more like Windows 10 only has BETA Testers. It’s as if most of the QA/QC folks have disappeared some years back and everything that’s getting downstream gets very little treatment from the mostly non fully functional upstream vetting sources.

  2. ULBoom said on December 23, 2019 at 3:50 pm
    Reply

    230846(-8)DEC19
    Is there really a right way?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_standard

    23/12/2019 is no less ambiguous than 12/23/2019 or 19/12/23. Local customs don’t make one better than the other.

    23 Dec (20)19 and Dec 23, 2019 are not ambiguous. I tend to use the first, maybe because of work in industries that don’t allow purely numerical dates.

    Relax :)

    Does MS have a “Team Management Team” to manage all these new teams they’ve created?

    From a real presentation at one of my employers:
    “We’ve learned to make scrap faster than we ever have…”

    Place your bets!

  3. Software tester said on December 23, 2019 at 9:34 am
    Reply

    US uses very silly date format (mm/dd/yyyy), nothing logisch , the correct one MUST be Day-Month-Year (dd/mm/yyyy ) ,After days come Months after Months Come Year/s why US people don’t understand the Logisch ??????????
    US must follow The rest of the world , Please change your stupid date format US people

    1. kalmly said on December 23, 2019 at 4:21 pm
      Reply

      Looks like we put our commas in different places too. I guess we’re just OK with being illogischal.

  4. Darren said on December 23, 2019 at 8:37 am
    Reply

    Oh Yes. More unpolished turds please.

  5. Jozsef said on December 23, 2019 at 5:37 am
    Reply

    New Windows versions used to come every few years but now twice a year needs to be speeded up? Great idea. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

  6. Douglas Wardle said on December 23, 2019 at 4:04 am
    Reply

    I’ve tried and tried, but no matter what, I can’t enter nd, rd, or th into my date fields

  7. Richard Steven Hack said on December 23, 2019 at 1:14 am
    Reply

    Yeah, that’ll make it more reliable and secure…speeding up development… Let’s make our major mistakes faster, guys! We’re not making enough money to suit Bill! LOL

  8. John Fenderson said on December 23, 2019 at 1:06 am
    Reply

    This will be interesting. As pHROZEN gHOST mentions, this doesn’t address the largest problem Microsoft is having, which is very poor QA. Although it does make one thing worse — a big part of the problems Microsoft has been having is that they are pushing software development too fast as it it. I don’t see how making it faster will improve things.

    But, hey, maybe I’m wrong.

    1. jern said on December 23, 2019 at 8:48 pm
      Reply

      The “cloud” is making MS a lot of money. MS takes Azure development seriously. Linking Win10 development to Azure may indicate that MS is going to start taking Win10 development seriously. It will be interesting to see if MS starts to consider Win10 a serious enterprise product instead of a privacy-intrusive consumer product.

      1. John Fenderson said on December 26, 2019 at 5:09 pm
        Reply

        @jern:

        I understand what you’re saying, but that doesn’t speak to my concerns about this, which is that is will probably result in a further reduction in software quality. Even if it doesn’t, though, it sounds like it will result in more updates being issued more frequently — which is a bad thing all around, in my opinion, even if the updates are solid.

  9. suzie said on December 23, 2019 at 12:08 am
    Reply

    Faster at churning out bug ridden updates isn’t something to look forward to. Bringing back their QA teams would be.

  10. Anonymous said on December 22, 2019 at 10:08 pm
    Reply

    Microsoft programmers are USA-centric and the the rest of the word seems to have been an afterthought (not blaming them – fact of where people are raised). The result of that for the rest of us is sometimes a lot of effort so our people can see something in an order that is logical to them.

    Incidentally, in Excel, Date is actually the number of days since 31/12/1899 (day 1 is 1/1/1900)… Except, when you use the 1904 date system! Its the format that changes that to mm/dd/yyyy, dd/mm/yyyy or however else you like to see it. Time is actually fractions of a day (0.5 is midday).

    Importing a file into Excel, if it reads the first x lines of a field and makes decisions whether or not anything that looks like a date matches your system format. You get a mix of dd/mm/yyyy entries Excel that are incorrect ( except 1/1/yy, 2/2/yy, 3/3/yy, etc) plus some mm/dd/yyyy values that Excel interprets as text. It looks OK but you cannot work with the result. If you want to start working with dates before 1/1/1900 in Excel, you have problems in front of you.
    http://www.exceluser.com/formulas/earlydates.htm
    Please world, start using yyyy/mm/dd, which sorts correctly whether text or numbers.

  11. vip said on December 22, 2019 at 9:26 pm
    Reply

    “The change makes a lot of sense considering that it gives Microsoft more flexibility when it comes to the introduction of new features. Instead of having to wait for the next feature update release, Microsoft could push out new features at any time it wants . . . ”

    Uh, actually, what sense does this make? If Microsoft can release new features any time it wants, what’s the point in having an official, scheduled feature release date? So now it’s on a random, ad hoc, whenever-MS-feels-like-it basis with one or more scheduled releases thrown in, or is it vice versa?

    Somebody’s using some kind of logic I’m proudly not in sync with. Talk about “folks” at MS smokin’ somethin’. (I think they’re smokin’ somethin’ when they’re thinking, period, and working on their code.) Call the cops, or is that now legal in WA?

  12. Trinh said on December 22, 2019 at 8:15 pm
    Reply

    All this ‘engineering’ and yet Windows 10 is still unusable without a simple, easily accessible option to completely and permanently remove all telemetry, data collection and calling home activity.

  13. kalmly said on December 22, 2019 at 5:57 pm
    Reply

    Ohmygod, NO!

  14. pHROZEN gHOST said on December 22, 2019 at 5:50 pm
    Reply

    This does not address the 800 pound gorilla in the room … Quality Assurance Testing.

    1. nealis said on December 23, 2019 at 5:19 am
      Reply

      @pHROZEN gHOST, After 2015 there has been no real QA department. Microsoft used to have a huge lab with hundreds of computers of all configurations to test out their patches to ensure QA.

      However Nadella sacked everyone and got rid of the lab and now they depend solely on Virtual machines, forced telementry, and the small set of people who run the insider build to trouble shoot bugs which means it is a very small selective group of configurations and machines.

  15. VioletMoon said on December 22, 2019 at 5:10 pm
    Reply

    “The change makes a lot of sense considering that it gives Microsoft more flexibility when it comes to the introduction of new features. Instead of having to wait for the next feature update release, Microsoft could push out new features at any time it wants to, to any version of Windows 10 it wants under the new structure.”

    Somewhat disagree since the problem I sense is a lack of intercommunication between “teams,” however that term can be employed prior to the new formation of “teams,” already. The lack of clear communication results in a self-defeating pattern of early releases that aren’t tested or validated for the general user population.

    Knowing now that MS plans on pushing out “new features at any time,” willy-nilly makes the frigid temperature in our valley downright climatically absolute zero.

    1. semper liber said on December 23, 2019 at 1:47 am
      Reply

      Yup..

      Yet as for “intercommunication”, I guess you’re going off how MS releases info to the public that’s contradictive?

      If so, understand that all may not seem as it may. In other words, they may not be so dumb, but have been implementing a hidden agenda, involving their fake news releases and such, to gather and/or sway public opinion or whatever. Also, such reverse/hidden psychology tactics may not appear logical, but if it achieves some profitable goal, I expect they will use such tactics as they see fit, regardless of what we think.

      When it comes to marketing (AKA brainwashing), the gullible masses don’t always go for what is logical, as with
      pathetic devotees who are unwittingly attracted to failure and lies.

  16. chesscanoe said on December 22, 2019 at 4:19 pm
    Reply

    I think it is a good sign Microsoft has the ability to rethink how Windows should evolve. I hope the road will not be too rocky for the user.

    1. vip said on December 24, 2019 at 4:48 am
      Reply

      chesscanoe:

      When has the road not been rocky? I have exactly, specifically, and precisely no faith in M$; why should we? Your hope is lost. Lost hope. Get used to it.

  17. TheWorldHasTurnedUpsideDown said on December 22, 2019 at 2:56 pm
    Reply

    How comes a year has 22 months (22/12/2019 – see screenshot above)? What do the folks at Microsoft smoke?

    1. Allwynd said on December 23, 2019 at 11:16 am
      Reply

      @TheWorldHasTurnedUpsideDown,

      LOL!!!

      I have my date displayed like this:

      23-Dec-19

      IMO it’s the best date format, because there is no chance one will get confused.

    2. Yuliya said on December 22, 2019 at 9:18 pm
      Reply

      ohmygod what are you doing people, replying to this bait? lmao

      1. Anon said on December 23, 2019 at 9:35 am
        Reply

        You’re a worse bait here with all your suggestions about vk, yandex and other stuff from ‘motherland’.

      2. Yuliya said on December 23, 2019 at 2:04 pm
        Reply

        They are really good services and I’m using them. What is wrong?

    3. HopeA. said on December 22, 2019 at 6:05 pm
      Reply

      With Windows 10, M$ has created such a MESS!!!
      They do not know where Windows 10 is heading to:every six months, the add and remove features.
      Needless to comment on the many problems Windows 10 has been associated with.
      I hope that the next Windows Version (11?) will not suffer from what Windows 10 has suffered…

    4. DaveyK said on December 22, 2019 at 5:53 pm
      Reply

      It’s dated in the dd/mm/yyyy format – which practically the entire world apart from the US uses. I expect this is a screenshot from Martin’s PC, and as he’s based in Germany and not the US, it won’t use the barmy US date format.

      1. vip said on December 22, 2019 at 9:00 pm
        Reply

        I don’t know what “barmy” means, but I guess it’s not good. Who says, for example, 22 December? Nobody in America (except the military). It’s December 22nd. Makes perfect sense; identify the month then the day of the month. The rest of the world is wrong, including anybody who says “barmy.”

      2. John Fenderson said on December 26, 2019 at 5:05 pm
        Reply

        @vip: “The rest of the world is wrong”

        I’m an American, and our way of writing dates has been a pet peeve of mine since I was in grade school. It’s illogical and confusing. The rest of the world is only half right, though. d-m-y makes much more sense than m-d-y, but I think the only right way is y-m-d.

      3. Tom Hawack said on December 27, 2019 at 10:18 am
        Reply

        @John Fenderson, I agree that y-m-d is the best date notation, universal so to say, given of course the year be displayed with four digits!

      4. DaveyK said on December 23, 2019 at 3:16 pm
        Reply

        vip: I do get that, and most people in the rest of the world say 23rd December 2019. Even leaving that aside, going from months to days, then back to years isn’t particularly intuitive. Going in-order from smallest to largest (or vice-versa) does make a lot more sense. Saying that, my personal preference is YYYY:MM:DD – mainly as filenames titled in this way will sort correctly in chronological order.

      5. vip said on December 23, 2019 at 3:52 pm
        Reply

        I understand the y-m-d format for sorting purposes. For more informal purposes, my comments stand. Thanks.

    5. Bachi said on December 22, 2019 at 5:53 pm
      Reply

      Are you serious?

    6. Martin Brinkmann said on December 22, 2019 at 5:15 pm
      Reply

      Most countries use Day-Month-Year, only a handful (US and Philippines, maybe some more), use Month-Day-Year.

      1. chesscanoe said on December 22, 2019 at 11:15 pm
        Reply

        In the US, I personally have Windows 10 use YYYY-MM-DD where possible, with a 24 hour clock HH:MM:SS. Too bad Gmail does not check OS preferences.

      2. vip said on December 22, 2019 at 9:06 pm
        Reply

        Martin, sometimes the “REPLY” function doesn’t work right. The reply doesn’t go under what’s being replied to, indented. For example, just now, vip should be under DaveyK, indented. Not indented. This may or may not be indented under your comment “Most countries use . . . ” even though I clicked on your REPLY button. This has happened before.

      3. Paul(us) said on December 22, 2019 at 7:48 pm
        Reply

        I use this year, month, day period archiving method already for decades this because when you archiving its really much smarter for when your looking back for a certain entry in a period and your not quit sure what, is the specific subject your looking for.

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