How many developers does it take to write an operating system?

Bill - not Alan

At work we have a lively internal blog that is shared within our Research and Development department. An interesting post below from our Software Development Manager, Alan Smith, from the NBS side of the business...

I often wonder how many developers it takes to create things like Windows 7 and Microsoft Office. I happened upon this blog the other day:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2008/08/18/windows_5f00_7_5f00_team.aspx

It's written on the behalf of the Windows 7 development team and I found this part is really enlightening: "the Windows 7 engineering team is made up of about 25 different feature teams. A feature team represents those that own a specific part of Windows 7—the code, features, quality, and overall development. The feature teams represent the focus of work and coordination across the team. This also provides a much more manageable size—feature teams fit in meeting spaces, can go to movies, and so on. On average a feature team is about 40 developers, but there are a variety of team sizes."

So 1,000 software professionals to write Windows 7. Over the years we have not had quite that much resource to write NBS Specification Manager, NBS Building, NBS Contract Administrator, NBS Create etc... but still, when I am out and about showing off our products, I am pretty proud of what our design, development and testing teams have produced over the years.