14 DAY TRIAL // Next generation Windows 8 features are being developed by approximately 35 feature teams within the Windows organization, revealed Steven Sinofsky
, President, Windows and Windows Live Division.
The Windows boss talked about the people working on the next version of the operating system, referring mainly to those hard at work on the new features shipping in Windows 7’s successor.
“We organize the work of Windows into “feature teams,” groups of developers who own a combination of architectural elements and scenarios across Windows,” he said.
“We have about 35 feature teams in the Windows 8 organization. Each feature team has anywhere from 25-40 developers, plus test and program management, all working together. Our teams are all focused on building a global product, and so some of our teams are located outside the US and are also delivering globally.”
In addition, features can also come from softies that are not working for the Windows group, but for other products at the software giant.
Sinofsky underlined that building Windows does not imply the efforts of a specific group of people alone, but rather the collaboration of a plethora of development teams, including developers, project managers, testers, etc.
The Windows boss shared a list with some of the feature teams behind Windows 8 which I included at the bottom of this article. It’s a rather safe bet to expect new features to be shipped by all of the groups enumerated by Sinofsky.
“In general a feature team owns and builds what that most folks would identify as an area or component of Windows,” he notes.
But at the same time, Sinofsky points out that it’s nearly impossible to come to an universally accepted definition of what a feature is: “We long ago stopped trying to count new features because of the difficulty in defining a feature. We do count work items, which do map to the work and specs that we build (but that is a pretty long list).”
Despite this fact, the promise from Microsoft is that Windows 8 will bring to the table a consistent evolution compared to Windows 7.
“Windows 8 has new features across the full breadth of the product. It takes quite a team to build Windows 8, and so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the team structure—sometimes the “how” can help folks to understand the “what” and the “why.” This will give you an outline of the places we added features to Windows 8,” Sinofsky added.
Here are some of the feature teams working on Windows 8:
◦ App Compatibility and Device Compatibility ◦ App Store ◦ Applications and Media Experience ◦ App Experience ◦ Core Experience Evolved ◦ Device Connectivity ◦ Devices & Networking Experience ◦ Ecosystem Fundamentals ◦ Engineer Desktop ◦ Engineering System ◦ Enterprise Networking ◦ Global Experience ◦ Graphics Platform ◦ Hardware Developer Experience ◦ Human Interaction Platform ◦ Hyper-V ◦ In Control of Your PC ◦ Kernel Platform ◦ Licensing and Deployment ◦ Media Platform ◦ Networking Core ◦ Performance ◦ Presentation and Composition ◦ Reliability, Security, and Privacy ◦ Runtime Experience ◦ Search, View, and Command ◦ Security & Identity ◦ Storage & Files Systems ◦ Sustained Engineering ◦ Telemetry ◦ User-Centered Experience ◦ Windows Online ◦ Windows Update ◦ Wireless and Networking services ◦ XAML