One of the issues that Microsoft has to deal with on a very
large scale is that while they are managing 1200 individual
features, all of this works on a single code base. With all that
activity going on, how do you maintain the quality of the code
base, while allowing individual teams to focus on their
features.  Our answer is feature crews. Its a model we adapted
from the Microsoft Office team. It looks something like this:
When a feature crew (a team of people) is assigned to work on a
feature, the lifecycle looks like this:    1. The feature crew
creates a branch of the main source branch, to provide an
isolated environment to work on their feature. They are isolated
from any churn going on in the source branch, and they isolate
everyone else from their work   2. As they work on the feature,
there are two checkpoints. Checkpoints are when they present to
management, to ensure management is in the loop of what is being
done, and allows management to provide feedback on direction.
Checkpoint #1 is about de