Vista behind the scenes

 Nice piece by Ina Fried on ZDNet News:

That list includes rank-and-file Windows employees, as well as some of the company’s top brass. Allchin and his technical assistant, for example, are still trying to find bugs that the servers and development teams have missed.

“I’m doing video calls with my mom in Boston,” Allchin said. “I’m doing remote assistance to jump into a machine, and then I ‘remote desktop’ from that machine to another machine.”

Elsewhere, Allchin is testing a multimonitor set-up with four displays, including some in portrait mode. Paul Donnelly, who manages part of Microsoft’s Vista test operation, has been doing the same thing for some time. As the finalization deadline has neared, he has added more systems to his office. As of last week, he had nine machines crammed into his office. He is among those who nearly always picks up the daily build.

That’s pretty close to what I’ve got here. Over the past few months I’ve had five or six physical machines doing Vista testing and up to six virtual machines at any time. It’s hard enough keeping up with weekly builds; I can’t imagine what it would be like to keep daily builds running on that many boxes