How VSTS is Accelerating the Engineering Group Behind Windows

This post details the engineering effort by the Windows and Devices Group (WDG) to scale Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) for their large organization. Key contributions include building a pull request system capable of handling millions of commits and hundreds of thousands of pull requests, implementing background PR queues to prevent race conditions, and developing an extension for direct merge conflict resolution within VSTS. It also highlights the rationalization of over 10 million work items, reducing work item types, fields, and states to improve VSTS performance and reporting. The post emphasizes the cultural and process changes required for this scale, including standardizing terminology and states.