Don
Sun Jul 08 10:27:13 CDT 2007
"kuasha" <kuasha@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:A9186975-E561-40B0-9A01-0C5AA8FBDA9E@microsoft.com...
> It seems, to me, driver development is different from application
> development
> at a large scale. I wonder how hard it is to develop a team in a
> relatively
> small development house - let alone an efficient team. It is not possible
> to
> get a lot of driver development job - so few programmers are interested
> to be
> specialized at this area. And as you do not get driver developer easily
> you
> can not manage project easily - and loss interest for future driver
> projects.
> Strange situation.
>
It is much worse than you think. First, driver development is typically an
individual effort. In some cases a small team can work on a single driver,
but this is rare. Also, there are many variations on driver types, someone
who does printer drivers is not likely to be any good at storage or
networking.
As you said driver development is different, it requires a level of quality
few applications can meet. A malfunctioning application is annoying, a bad
driver can take out the OS, or all the data. Also, drivers need to be
highly concious of secutity since they run as part of the system.
One of the worst things are the development houses who claim thousands of
man-years in driver development. What a piece of crap! To be an
experienced driver developer takes 5 to 10 years of experience, so if you
choose 5 that means they have 200 people with that level of experience,
somehow I think they are lying. Actually, I can say for sure since Walt
Oney and I both encountered situations where we lost bids to these firms,
then either saw queries on the newsgroups or were contacted directly by
people who were doing the work we lost and who had never done a driver.
My recomendatin to firms is contract out your driver development, unless
you have a number to do. In fact if you can hire two firms, one to do the
work, and one to review it. Of course as a consultant I am biased.
--
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website:
http://www.windrvr.com
Blog:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
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