Jeff describes how the whole MSBuild team locked themselves into a room for a week in order to fix bugs. This process is known as Hackathon (not part of the Jargon?) in the open source world and Jeff lists the most important ingredients of it: laptops and pizza.
From what he describes they've been quite successful, getting their bug count from 437 down to 264. As a comparison, there are currently 241 bugs and 444 enhancement requests logged against Ant, but we probably could do away with half of them (if not more) if we'd use WONTFIX more seriously/realistically.
Jeff's entry also sheds some light on how the team works, even more so than the blog of some students participating in a program called "Explore Microsoft".
could testers and program managers even fix bugs?
I hope his question was rhetorical. How about testers doing pair programming with developers to write unit tests? The whole separation of non-coding testers and developers is a very traditional picture that I wouldn't expect at Microsoft. I somehow expected them to be more "agile".
we don't yet know how many new bugs we introduced, or how the regression rate compares to the usual scenario when only developers are working on the codebase
You don't have an automated testsuite that would catch your regressions?
It looks as if they enjoyed their week, as if the testers (Jeff is one of them) got closer to the code and all of them learned a lot. If they keep discovering best practices that way, unit tests and continuous integration should be their next stops.
path: /en/dotNet/msbuild | #