Microsoft reveals Windows 8 team

Microsoft in their blog reveled a big team of departments which played their role in constructing, developing and testing Windows 8 operating system. Steven Sinofsky, product manager at Microsoft in his blog reveled a big list of team's which played prominent role in building Windows 8.

He mentioned the role of each department which contributed to Windows 8. They categorized the team into different departments to build Windows 8 operating system. As per Sinofsky "We organize the work of Windows into "feature teams," groups of developers who own a combination of architectural elements and scenarios across Windows. 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."

As per the blog, Windows 8 team has several engineering roles. When Developers write code, the implementation work on Windows 8 starts. The code implementation features will come from specifications which are written by program management along with interaction design from the product designers. The role of the Testers is to make sure that the specifications are complete and the code does do what it is intended to do. Simply, Microsoft classified the team as Development, Test and Program Management which were working with each other throughout the entire release.

Microsoft, mainly organized the big team into seven larger groups which has many sub-groups. The seven main groups in building Windows 8 are

1) Fundamentals

2) Devices and Networking

3) Core OS

4) Developer Experience

5) User Experience

6) Web Services

7) Microsoft own Engineering System.

The remaining sub-groups are

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

Apart from these groups, Microsoft has many other teams like Content development team which assists them in writes and edits of their online assistance, website, deployment documents and SDKs. Product planning team leads customer and Market Research team plays very close attention to feedback and telemetry around the pre-release software.

Product Design team develops the overall interaction model, graphical language and design language for Windows 8 operating system. Microsoft's Research and usability team creates field and lab studies which show how existing products and proposed features perform with all types of customers. Localization team brings Windows 8 to over 100 languages. Microsoft's operation team runs services which are used by many people around the world.

You can find a sub-group named App Store in the sub-groups list, which intern says Windows 8 will have an App Store.