The Adventure of Developing a Software Application on a Pre-release Platform: Features and Learned Lessons

From September 2011 to May 2012, Microsoft delivered three pre-releases of Windows 8. Its principal goal was to present the features of this operating system (OS) and motivate the development of new applications to this platform. However, as any pre-release version, several parts of the code and related documentations were incomplete. Furthermore, its APIs were very prone to be changed until the final release. Even considering such risks, the company X decided to face these challenges and create an application to be embedded into Windows 8 tablets as soon as this OS was released. This paper discusses interesting aspects of this adventure and some lessons that may be important to development teams that intend to trail this kind of project. Metrics are also used to better characterize some of these aspects.