Shawn Burke's Blog

Yes, I'm now hooked enough on this triathlon thing that I'm calling it a race season. The whole thing has gotten kind of out of control. The decision to do my first on in July was made in early June so it happened pretty fast. But since then I've ended up with all kinds of stuff:

A Wetsuit

A racing suit

A new road bike to replace my 1990 Trek 1400

A Time Trial/Triathlon Bike - yes, I couldn't resist. Two bikes is over the top but once I rode one of these it was an easy choice. It's freaking fast.

Several pairs of goggles

Hmm, I think that's it except for other tri-geek stuff like racing belts, all kinds of bizarre carbo-goo, and I'm working on getting a new helmet (spending money to protect my brain better seems resaonable) and even some race wheels. Exactly what I needed though, another excuse to buy expensive toys.

What's driving all of this? Well, for one I'm a tad on the obsessive side, but that probably couldn't be clearer by now. But really a lot of it is that I started having some success and that's a hell of a motivator. Here's how things went:

Race	Date	Total Participants	Division Participants	Overall Place	Div Place	Swim Place	Bike Place	Run Place	Swim Pace	Bike Pace	Run Pace	Swim %	Bike %	Run %	Div %	Overall %
SeaFair 2004	18-Jul-04	1044	112	425	73	877	291	426	2.19	19.66	7:55	84%	28%	41%	65%	41%
Beaver Lake 2004	14-Aug-04	620	65	196	35	277	173	279	2.09	19.38	8:05	45%	28%	45%	54%	32%
YMCA Lake Samm 2004	28-Aug-04	367	26	26	4	87	22	44	1.60	20.33	7:07	24%	6%	12%	15%	7%
Kirkland 2004	19-Sep-04	787	88	116	22	309	120	145	1.51	18.03	7:16	39%	15%	18%	25%	15%

Each % column at the end is what % of people did better than me overall, or I was in the top X%. for each discipline and/or overall. What really helped me was the improvments in my swim pace (min/100yards) and run pace (min/mile). Bike pace is improving, note Kirkland is a very hilly course so it's not really apples-to-apples with the other races. And all of these were with the old bike, can't wait to see if the investment listed above pans out. Note that since each race is different, actual times are meaningless here so I stick to paces and relative performance to other people's results. I'm looking at doing 8 or 9 races next year, including the half-Ironman in Spokane. Now if it would just stop getting dark at 3:30 so I can leave the gym!

Yes, I'm now hooked enough on this triathlon thing that I'm calling it a race season. The whole thing has gotten kind of out of control. The decision to do my first on in July was made in early June so it happened pretty fast. But since then I've ended up with all kinds of stuff:

A Wetsuit

A racing suit

A new road bike to replace my 1990 Trek 1400

A Time Trial/Triathlon Bike - yes, I couldn't resist. Two bikes is over the top but once I rode one of these it was an easy choice. It's freaking fast.

Several pairs of goggles

Hmm, I think that's it except for other tri-geek stuff like racing belts, all kinds of bizarre carbo-goo, and I'm working on getting a new helmet (spending money to protect my brain better seems resaonable) and even some race wheels. Exactly what I needed though, another excuse to buy expensive toys.

What's driving all of this? Well, for one I'm a tad on the obsessive side, but that probably couldn't be clearer by now. But really a lot of it is that I started having some success and that's a hell of a motivator. Here's how things went:

Race	Date	Total Participants	Division Participants	Overall Place	Div Place	Swim Place	Bike Place	Run Place	Swim Pace	Bike Pace	Run Pace	Swim %	Bike %	Run %	Div %	Overall %
SeaFair 2004	18-Jul-04	1044	112	425	73	877	291	426	2.19	19.66	7:55	84%	28%	41%	65%	41%
Beaver Lake 2004	14-Aug-04	620	65	196	35	277	173	279	2.09	19.38	8:05	45%	28%	45%	54%	32%
YMCA Lake Samm 2004	28-Aug-04	367	26	26	4	87	22	44	1.60	20.33	7:07	24%	6%	12%	15%	7%
Kirkland 2004	19-Sep-04	787	88	116	22	309	120	145	1.51	18.03	7:16	39%	15%	18%	25%	15%

Each % column at the end is what % of people did better than me overall, or I was in the top X%. for each discipline and/or overall. What really helped me was the improvments in my swim pace (min/100yards) and run pace (min/mile). Bike pace is improving, note Kirkland is a very hilly course so it's not really apples-to-apples with the other races. And all of these were with the old bike, can't wait to see if the investment listed above pans out. Note that since each race is different, actual times are meaningless here so I stick to paces and relative performance to other people's results. I'm looking at doing 8 or 9 races next year, including the half-Ironman in Spokane. Now if it would just stop getting dark at 3:30 so I can leave the gym!

Okay it's been a while but here's an update with where we're at with Whidbey on the dev side. A few weeks ago we passed ZBB for Beta 2. What's ZBB you say? Well I'm glad you asked. Basically, you need to drive the product to a "known" state at intervals throughout the cycle or you'll never get it shipped. So before each major milestone, the whole division drives towards Zero Bug Bounce, on a per-team basis. ZBB for a team is when that team has zero active bugs for a moment in time. Now, for this to happen there are some caveats. Brand new bugs, usually less than 48 hours old, don't count. Certain types of bugs that we call "tracking bugs" don't count, since those are usually in the system to track something that isn't a specific bug. And there's usually some other special case exceptions but that's the idea. And there is a set of bugs that get pushed over to the next milestone for one reason or another. For example, we pushed a set of bugs over that didn't really need to be fixed for Beta 2. We made sure we fixed all of the Priority 1 bugs and most of the Priority 2 bugs. We feel okay saving some of the fit and finish stuff until after Beta 2. I was most concerned about getting fixes in for any large, very complicated, or very risky fixes so that we can get the maximum bake time in.

We started our Beta 2 push in earnest in early July, with some work items we call DCR's (Design Change Requests), and when we wrapped those up we moved directly into the ZBB push. Between June 25th and November 12th, the dev team fixed over 3,500 bugs. Realize, I've got about 14 devs on the team fixing bugs so that's pretty amazing. The team as a whole resolved (not all bugs that are filed get fixed -- some are duplicates of other issues, some don't reproduce by the time we get to them, some are actually by-design behavior) over 7700 bugs, and 5300 new ones came in during that amount of time, so we had a net gain of about 2200 bugs over that period of time. Just in the 3 weeks starting October 11th, the team resolved 2022 bugs, which is really amazing. During the same period of time QA was doing their full test pass (FTP) which generates the vast majority of these issues -- we don't normally see that kind of incoming!

It was a ton of work but we feel really good about this Beta 2 and we think you'll like it too. We were really hard core about getting the right bugs fixed for this beta, hopefully we made the right choices. Ladybug has definitely helped us make some of those decisions.

So that's where we sit. Fortunately we're right up on the holidays so the team gets a well-deserved break. After the holiday's we'll lock the tree down for work on super-critical issues and stress bugs, then head towards shipping this thing. We'll start fixing the bugs that we pushed out of Beta 2, spend some more time on performance across Windows Forms, and maybe even start scratching our heads and thinking about what's next. Whidbey kicked off (for real, there's a long story here...) in September of 2002 so it's been a pretty long road!

Okay it's been a while but here's an update with where we're at with Whidbey on the dev side. A few weeks ago we passed ZBB for Beta 2. What's ZBB you say? Well I'm glad you asked. Basically, you need to drive the product to a "known" state at intervals throughout the cycle or you'll never get it shipped. So before each major milestone, the whole division drives towards Zero Bug Bounce, on a per-team basis. ZBB for a team is when that team has zero active bugs for a moment in time. Now, for this to happen there are some caveats. Brand new bugs, usually less than 48 hours old, don't count. Certain types of bugs that we call "tracking bugs" don't count, since those are usually in the system to track something that isn't a specific bug. And there's usually some other special case exceptions but that's the idea. And there is a set of bugs that get pushed over to the next milestone for one reason or another. For example, we pushed a set of bugs over that didn't really need to be fixed for Beta 2. We made sure we fixed all of the Priority 1 bugs and most of the Priority 2 bugs. We feel okay saving some of the fit and finish stuff until after Beta 2. I was most concerned about getting fixes in for any large, very complicated, or very risky fixes so that we can get the maximum bake time in.

We started our Beta 2 push in earnest in early July, with some work items we call DCR's (Design Change Requests), and when we wrapped those up we moved directly into the ZBB push. Between June 25th and November 12th, the dev team fixed over 3,500 bugs. Realize, I've got about 14 devs on the team fixing bugs so that's pretty amazing. The team as a whole resolved (not all bugs that are filed get fixed -- some are duplicates of other issues, some don't reproduce by the time we get to them, some are actually by-design behavior) over 7700 bugs, and 5300 new ones came in during that amount of time, so we had a net gain of about 2200 bugs over that period of time. Just in the 3 weeks starting October 11th, the team resolved 2022 bugs, which is really amazing. During the same period of time QA was doing their full test pass (FTP) which generates the vast majority of these issues -- we don't normally see that kind of incoming!

It was a ton of work but we feel really good about this Beta 2 and we think you'll like it too. We were really hard core about getting the right bugs fixed for this beta, hopefully we made the right choices. Ladybug has definitely helped us make some of those decisions.

So that's where we sit. Fortunately we're right up on the holidays so the team gets a well-deserved break. After the holiday's we'll lock the tree down for work on super-critical issues and stress bugs, then head towards shipping this thing. We'll start fixing the bugs that we pushed out of Beta 2, spend some more time on performance across Windows Forms, and maybe even start scratching our heads and thinking about what's next. Whidbey kicked off (for real, there's a long story here...) in September of 2002 so it's been a pretty long road!