For this week's assignment, you are the manager of several hundred programmers building a large software product for your company. The examples on page 11 of the RaceTrack paper cross your desk, and you are disturbed to learn that these race-condition bugs slipped through several years of Microsoft's code reviews, undetected. Despite this disappointing case study (or maybe because of it), you decide to try to prevent your company's program from shipping with concurrency bugs.

In your role as manager, write a one-page memo to your employees outlining the rules or steps you will put in place to try to prevent similar bugs from appearing in your company's product. Since the programmers may not jump at your every command, you will also need to persuade them that this is the right course of action. You only have one page, so it's best to focus on the most important points and justifications.

Remember to address the memo to your employees. The Mayfield Handbook discusses the appropriate style for a business memo.

Use no more than one sheet of paper for your report. (Consult the 6.033 FAQ for formatting specifications.) We care more about quality and conciseness than the amount of content in your essay. You will not be able to address every issue in one page, so you will have to make your best argument and judiciously choose supporting facts for this one-pager.

Two copies of this assignment are due at the beginning of recitation on Thursday, March 2, 2006. The second copy will be forwarded to the writing program for evaluation.