I've been wanting to write this blog entry for some time now and  just have never found the time to sit down and do it. Well today seem like as good a day as any to do it.  I'm not focusing on the entire SQL server development process but rather give you some insight in to what we did in the manageability team. This is more philosophical for high-level process then meat and potatoes.

After we shipped SQL2K5 we sat down and brainstormed things we could do for the next release. As you can imagine the list was amazingly long. There was one major theme that we wanted to adhere to: make it easier to manage SQL Server. You can say this a number of different ways but they all mean the same thing. Honestly that was the easy part the hard part was deciding of all the things we could do what would have the biggest bang for the buck. We did some detailed customer analysis to come up with three big bets. Those turned out to be Policy-based Management, Data Collector, and Intellisense. There were also a number of smaller areas we knew we wanted to invest in. Finally, we knew there were several things with the tools that we wanted to fix.

As anyone developing software knows you can't do everything at once. So we had to choose where to start. There are a number of different software development methodologies and processes. One thing that is common among almost all of them is to start with the riskest areas first. This meant we had to start on the three big bets.

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