How many people does it take to create the shutdown menu..
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
Just a quote.. the whole article is a good read
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html
Just a quote.. the whole article is a good read
So just on my team, these are the people who came to every single planning meeting about this feature:
# 1 program manager
# 1 developer
# 1 developer lead
# 2 testers
# 1 test lead
# 1 UI designer
# 1 user experience expert
# --
# 8 people total
These planning meetings happened every week, for the entire year I worked on Windows.
In addition to the above, we had dependencies on the shell team (the guys who wrote, designed and tested the rest of the Start menu), and on the kernel team (who promised to deliver functionality to make our shutdown UI as clean and simple as we wanted it). The relevant part of the shell team was about the same size as our team, as was the relevant part of kernel team.
So that nets us an estimate -- to pull a number out of the air -- of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 19 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team -- after a year -- there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.
By the way "feature" is much too strong a word; a better description would be "menu". Really.