The year without pants-build processes at Microsoft

It turned out the adjustment was easy. The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft had an equivalent, called the daily build, where we released a version of the software every day, but it was available exclusively inside the company.3 Each day all the changes from the previous day were compiled and released, and everyone was expected to install and use them. This gave us regular feedback on the quality of what we were making, including nuggets of joy, or moments of misery, when new features were added. On good days, the builds were high quality, and we called those releases self-host, as in “safe to host on your computer.” Builds that were mediocre were called self-test, suggesting you install it only on a test computer (or a coworker’s when the person wasn’t looking). The worst builds were called self-toast, meaning you’d destroy whatever machine you had dared installed it on. Whenever we had three days in a row with self-toast builds, all new work stopped until we got the build quality up to a good level (a measure to prevent the project from digging a dangerously deep quality hole for itself). Shipping on WordPress.com was the same philosophy, just accelerated and made public to customers.