Mar 19, 2020 08:00:00

A veteran with over 25 years of service talks about the back story about bug management of the Windows development team

The history of bug management by Microsoft's Windows development team dates back to

Windows 1.0 on MS-DOS . Raymond Chen, who has been developing Windows for more than 25 years, tells in his blog the story behind bug management systems from Windows 1.0 to Windows 10 .

We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead | The Old New Thing
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200317-00/?p=103566

When Windows 1.01 was released, a database was built by the Windows development team's apps department to manage bugs. The name of the database was decided as 'RAID' as a result of voting within the team. The name RAID comes from the brand name of the insecticide ' Raid ' and was chosen because the catch phrase 'Kills bugs dead.' The program icon was designed to resemble an insecticide spray can, and the file extension was '.rdq' for RAID Query .

According to Mr. Chen, seems to have established itself as a thing RAID is several years after the birth, the origin of the name that somehow RAID you omit the initials of rather than the insecticide 'R eporting A nd I ncidents D atabase'. However, no one knew the cause and did not care.

When operating RAID, 'registering project bugs in the RAID database' is called 'RAID a bug', and RAID has become a word within the team. The extension .rdq has also been established as a unique abbreviation for query files, such as 'Can you send me the .rdq for bugs to be reviewed tomorrow?'

RAID was born in the era when the

16-bit architecture was mainstream, and up to 32,767 bugs could be registered at the beginning of development. At the time, it was large enough, but as technology advanced and Windows updated, it ran out of space and had to migrate to a new database. Unfixed bugs from the old database were also copied to the newly created database, and the old database was saved read-only.

After the migration to the new database, the control number of the bug copied from the old database was shifted, which caused confusion within the team immediately after the migration. For example, even if there is a comment 'fix bug 3141' in the source code, it may not be possible to know which bug the number refers to.

Subsequently, three database migrations occurred during the

Windows 95 support period. RAID developers did not seem to think that the small bug management database they created would be a tool that will be used for about 20 years, and in fact one of the developers said, `` Make it so long lasting No, I'm sorry! 'Chen apologized.

Several years later, as Windows XP development projects went well, there were many instances where too many users in the company were accessing RAID at the same time, causing the server to stop accepting new connections. did. For this reason, when checking the status of a project at a meeting or the like, he sometimes asked to disconnect some other employees so that all participants could connect to the database.

Against this background, the requirements of the Windows development team for the bug management database exceeded the limits of RAID, so a new bug management database 'Product Studio' was finally developed. Product Studio, like RAID, has no limit on the number of bugs that can be registered, employs a three-tier architecture for increased reliability and flexibility, and also supports file attachments.

Product Studio served as a bug management database instead of RAID. However, suddenly the app stopped responding and bugs frequently appeared stating 'An error occurred while connecting to the middle tier.' Too often the same bug persisted, so Chen often joked with his colleagues that 'the middle class should be removed.'

Product Studio was used until Windows 8 appeared. The bug management system after Product Studio has been switched to ' Team Foundation Services ' which is a project management tool including bug management. By the time Windows 10 appears, it has transitioned to ' Visual Studio Online '. Since then, Visual Studio Online has changed its name to ' Azure DevOps Services ' as of March 2020.

According to Chen, Azure DevOps Services also doesn't seem to be large enough to manage all the tasks in Windows development. Older projects are archived on a regular basis, but unfortunately archived projects have their control numbers changed. However, since the original control number is saved as the title, `` Even if the code says 'fix bug 3141', you can find the old task without problems, '' Chen says .