David Gristwood, an employee at Microsoft, today posted an article by Jim McCarthy entitled 21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software On Time.  Whatever your opinion of Microsoft software in general, they do ship software that meets most users’ needs most of the time, and developers can learn a lot from the rules they (try to) follow.  I haven’t fully digested the article, so won’t comment on it much other than to say that it’s well worth the read.

Some of the discussion following the article is quite good, but you’ll have to filter out the juvenile “Microsoft sucks” comments that are the result of the article being mentioned on Slashdot.  I don’t have the patience to wade through the inevitable mountain of crap on the Slashdot thread.