In a nondescript conference room at the heart of Microsoft Corp."s campus here, 35 developers sit shoulder to shoulder and prepare for battle. This is the Visual Studio "ship room," and in minutes it will play host to a raucous, relentless and occasionally personal debate over the bugs remaining in the Visual Studio 2005 application development tools. Developers with underperforming modules try to maintain game faces while being hammered with questions over so-called ship stoppers—bugs that threaten to affect delivery of the product.
"We need this stuff fixed to go to RTM [release to manufacturing]," the meeting"s moderator barks. Meanwhile, nearby, a more genteel, but no less critical, session is taking place among 10 developers working on SQL Server 2005. Under the guidance of Paul Flessner, Microsoft"s senior vice president of server applications, the group sweats the details of testing, training and security in Microsoft"s much-anticipated database release.