Microsoft invented "escrow builds" to launch functional apps — that's internal 'Microspeak' jargon for quality control

Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a particularly close look at Microsoft's quirky vocabulary for internal communication. Forget the usual corporate jargon; like many organizations, Microsoft has its own set of abbreviations and, at times, entirely new words designed to make communication more effective and efficient

At the beginning of the month, Microsoft veteran engineer Raymond Chen revealed that the company would often use phrases like on fire — "when something has gone horribly wrong and requires immediate attention".

In his ongoing "Old New Thing" series, Chen has shared yet another insightful story highlighting Microspeak. According to the engineer, when the company was on the verge of releasing a product, the release management team would select a build and declare it to be "the escrow build."

The product in question would first need to meet a couple of thresholds before being declared as such, including surviving a period of concerted testing and self-host usage. This is in place to ensure that the product meets the set quality and reliability standards.

"The metaphor is that this build has been placed into the hands of an imaginary third party for eventual release to customers, provided certain requirements are met," Chen indicated.

He described it as unhelpful because the blog essentially described a metaphor using another metaphor. In that sense, Microsoft used bake to describe “(of a code change) to build confidence by observing its behavior over a period of time.”

Instead, Chen says a complete definition of escrow would be "the phase before the completion of the RTM milestone where the product accepts no changes while its behavior is closely observed to ensure that it meets release criteria."

If the release team identifies an issue with the product, they'll have to assess the situation to determine whether it's sufficiently complex to warrant a product change. As part of the assessment process, the team would need to establish how often the problem occurs, whether it affects one category of users more than another, the severity of its consequences, and how easy it would be to find a workaround.

"If a severe enough bug is discovered, then an escrow reset is declared, and the bug fix is accepted, a new build is produced, the new build is declared the new escrow build, and the cycle repeats," added Chen.

The company will have to go through the highlighted process multiple times until it goes through the escrow period without any escrow events. Consequently, the escrow build moves onto the manufacturing phase.

What do you think about Microsoft's jargon?

I'd like to know what you think about Microsoft using "escrow builds" as part of its release cycle for products. Do you think it's having the right effect?

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