In a never-ending quest to delight users with fresh, relevant features, Bing has been improving their innovation rate and code velocities. Four years ago, Bing engineers deployed new features once a month. To accelerate feature deployment and innovation, we have invested much effort in overcoming software engineering challenges. The monthly deployment cadence has been gone for some time, taking with it both the old culture and most of the infrastructure. In its place, a highly distributed, parallelized, and agile system has risen, and this system has been a game-changer for both developers working on Bing features and the live site users. Bing Engineering has spearheaded this effort, and has produced a world-class ideation, development, validation, and experimentation system. This system has scaled to the demands of 600 engineers (6X increase) running 20000 tests (10X increase) per submission attempt, and has kept feature submission times below 30 minutes which allows Bing to ship features to production multiple times per day. We disrupted and then evolved our culture to drive innovation on a daily basis and fundamentally altered the way our product evolves and how our business operates. Along the way, we’ve discovered a lot about the experience of Agility—or Continuous Delivery—and the real impact it has on our products, our users and our team. Regardless of your organization size, we believe this is a journey worth taking. Let me encourage you to take a look behind the scenes in this article from the Microsoft Engineering Stories series on Bing’s continuous delivery story.
Dr. Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist, Bing and Information Platform R&D