Microsoft's head of engineering for the Windows 7 operating system says there are 25 'feature teams' of about 100 employees each working on the upcoming replacement to Windows Vista.

Windows 7 teams work on anything from external features, such as user interfaces, to under-the-hood areas such as networking, according to Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft senior vice president for Windows and Windows Live engineering, in a Monday posting at the new "Engineering Windows 7" blog.

"We create feature teams with n developers, n testers, and 1/2n program managers," Sinofsky wrote in a four-page blog that introduced his views on managing large-scale software development. "On average a feature team is about 40 developers across the Windows 7 project."

Based on that arrangement, each feature team would appear to have about 40 developers writing code, an equal number of beta testers -- which Sinofsky separately described as "software development engineers in test" -- and about 20 program managers.

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