The book Microsoft Secrets, which came out in 1995, fills in some of the background: the first test teams were set up in 1984; there were expensive recalls of two pieces of software, Multiplan (a spreadsheet, which was a precursor to Excel) in 1984, and Word in 1987; and in May 1989, there was an internal meeting on the optimistic subject of “zero-defects code.”27 The
Possibly I should read this book.
