Musings of a tester testing test tools! : Personal

My top 3 favorite features of Outlook in Office 2010

anutthara — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Well – the tech preview for Office 2010 is now public – and I am bursting to tell you guys my favorite features of Outlook in Office 14. Being a Microsoftie, I practically live in Outlook…and Outlook 14 has some pretty nifty improvements that I absolutely loved! Here are my personal favorites:

Conversation view – saves a whole lot of inbox viewing space, lets me “cleanup” redundant mail in the thread. The really cool thing is that it shows a logical view of the conversation with mail not only from the current folder, but also strings together mail I sent or mail I moved to other folders.

Scheding meetings – you can now reply to a conversation with a meeting req – just right click and “reply with meeting” – neat. Plus the incoming meeting req now shows your calendar right inside the meeting req – so no extra clicking to navigate and see your calendar whether you are free, if not what meetings are going on. For instance, I can see right away that I can’t accept Nivedita’s meeting due to a conflict, nor move it out by an hour due to other meetings.

“Seeing” people – Having the photo of the sender integrated right into the mail header – very nice touch. I always underestimated how powerful that can be in a cross-site environment. Seeing photos of people right next to their email/contact list really makes me feel more as if I am really conversing with real people versus just sending messages to a faceless entity in Redmond or NC several thousand miles away. My personal favorites are Dominic’s photo with a VS tattoo on his head(!) and Ed grinning away into the camera :-)

Of course, some of these were available as power toys and other stand alone tools for Outlook 2007, but it’s really nice to see the scenario come together in 2010. There are other small but very thoughtful features like showing space remaining in your mailbox on the left corner when you start getting close to the limit, the quick contacts tab available in the bottom right to expedite IM. Being a tech preview, it has its share of hangs and crashes(aargh!) but I was impressed enough by the new features to keep it installed on my laptop :-)

[Edited: Duh - removed screenshots showing my mailbox!]

Odds and ends

anutthara — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:16:00 GMT

So, we've been heads down building the latest Rosario CTP of VSTT for you guys. Some good new stuff heading your way... more details when we release it ;-)

Meanwhile, like you must be knowing already, Orcas is on it's way to RTM. VSTT has some great stuff lined up on the load testing side - do check it out. And as with all releases, we are waiting nervously for this one to get out of the door safe and sound. Onto Rosario then!

Among other news, we had an EE day here at IDC, where we get to hear about cool new tech/processes emerging in other parts of the company. MSFT, being as big as it is currently, we certainly need a forum where we can share and learn new stuff across teams. The keynote was very Sinofsky - enjoyable and interesting as always. Peter Spiro did a fiery session as well on day 2 - where he spoke about his journey inside and outside of Microsoft. If I were given a 100 rupees for each time he swore, I'd be rich! LoL! Hard hitting and candid as usual - this guy inspires awe from even the most paranoid of people.

Alan Page gave a talk on testability, that was pretty neat. He also did this course for senior testers; that I'd highly recommend... lots of useful nuggets stringed well and sprinkled with some amusing and interesting anecdotes from him! And it was good seeing him in person - now I have a face to match the blog/mail/IM :)

Oh - and there will be a couple of guest posts from folks at my team on Rosario bits. They wanna test drive blogging and check if it's really their cup of tea...so my blog will be their guinea pig for now :)

Uh oh, manual testing is no longer manual?

anutthara — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:19:14 GMT

Well known test consultant James Bach has now coined a new term for manual testing - it's called sapient testing. Well, the part of manual testing that is not drudgery is called sapient testing at least. James makes a great point about how manual testing is actually a composite set of actions that can be divided into sections that CAN be automated and sections that can't. Yeah - I agree manual testing is a pretty overloaded term that way. Go read the article to find a lucid articulation of the whole manual testing process.

Most of us testers usually crib about not having a common language/jargon to talk to other testers. I have seen zillions of discussions about how QA and QM and testing are all completely different things. Innocent sounding words like test case and scenario are rendered ambiguous too. However, I wonder if we are collectively heading to the other part of the spectrum with too much terminology to remember? Trust us to solve one problem to lead to another :)

Hey - but the next time you talk to me about sapient testing, at least I won't give you a blank look :D

Technorati Tags: manual testing

I love Windows Live Writer!

anutthara — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:32:00 GMT

OMG! This has got to be the best blog writer tool I have ever seen! Forgive my drooling...but Live writer has just enchanted me with it's great features.

The setup is a ZERO hassle process akin to the marvelous setup experiences I've had with Outlook 2007. The rich editing and inline spell check features are a blast and the html has got to be the cleanest ever. Removing the extra bekaar tags that get inserted with other authoring tools was a sufficient deterrent to stop me from continuing to use those. The UI looks ultra-sleek and gives a squeaky-clean feeling. Recent posts show up and allow editing/preview with single clicks. Sweet!

Of course, I went berserk trying different plugins - and as with most products, some of the plugins seem to be more like features that fit in perfectly but did not figure into the prioritized list for the tool. Most importantly, I lovvvvved the "insert picture" feature - that has got to be the NUMBER ONE problem that most bloggers I know seemed to face. It's such a breeze now! And just for kicks, here is one of my favorite pics - Partha with a friend.

Thanks, Abhinaba and Srivatsn for pointing me to it. (oh - I just wanted to use the smiley from ScottIsAFool's plugin )

Who said taking screenshots was easy?

anutthara — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:36:00 GMT

Continuing the manual test thread that I started last week, here is a pain point that I experienced first hand while doing a bout of manual testing during a bug bash yesterday. When I file a bug, I need to attach an image to the bug to elucidate the erring scenario. Each time I had to take a screenshot, it was a multi step process. Do an Alt+PrntScreen, open MSPaint, paste it onto paint, annotate/modify it and save and then attach to a bug. Yeah, I know there are some good tools out there which come in pretty handy for this. One good tool for this is here and it directly links into my bug tracking system also. However, as is the case with all good things, this one has it's pitfalls too, one of it being that I can't attach files to a separate work item type but only to task. I did see a bunch of such tools scattered around and each has it's own pros and cons. Do you have a favorite tool for this? Why is it your favorite? Do write to me and I'll compile a list of tools that I hear about in my next post.

On other fronts, while I was busy setting up machines for an impending bug bash and playing music on my headphones, I was forced to look up due to a sudden light difference on my monitor. I turned around to see who was blocking my window light and there was Ed Glas, looking as fresh as a flower even after a long flight. He is visiting IDC this week and showing us all the cool new web and load test stuff that his team is building for the next release of VS. We had a team outing with Ed this evening and we went go-karting at Runway 9. We formed 3 teams and pitted members of each team against the other. Ed was shredding the track apart with his superfast racing, but we had our own local champs Ankur and Abhishek finish ahead of him in the final race. Needless to say, our team, that included both Ed and Ankur won the "championship" bagging first and third spots! :)

Starbucks coffee shop finder? Make me a chaat compass please...

anutthara — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 07:07:00 GMT

Raman Sarin has built a device that points to the nearest Starbucks coffee shop from any given location that was showcased in the latest Microsoft TechFest. It is a small wooden box with a compass at the centre that points in the direction of the closest Starbucks coffee centre guided by a database that contains all locations of Starbucks outlets. Pretty neat!

Titled "Coffee Compass", I believe there has been a lot of UI study that has gone into the product and the developers have finally arrived at the most optimal UI design. Personally, I found the spider shaped compass a bit icky! Just goes to show no UI can please everyone! :) Nice idea though - the compass one. I just wish we could have a chaat compass too - most ones in Hyd are an overload of spice and oil, but I could create my own database having a list of my fave chaat outlets (yes - I am that desperate! :-). Creating a map dynamically to the nearest point from the current location would be a cool feature to add too.

BTW, if the Coffee Compass is ever shipped as a product, the localized versions of the product should probably look for Cafe Coffee Day outlets in India! :-)

A new outlook on Outlook 12

anutthara — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 17:04:00 GMT

Outlook 12 has fulfilled a few wishes off my Office features wish list! First, the To-Do bar is so obviously simple yet so handy. For the first time in my life, I seem to have started using the tasks pane as it was meant to be used! Of course the more advanced or regular users of tasks in Outlook seem to be ruffled about the absence of sub tasks, but as I said, I didn't even get as far as tasks! :) The mail in the follow up folder also shows up in the To-do bar. A cool feature is the ability to add names to each colour of flag. Just having colors was pretty cryptic earlier. I don't like the date navigator though, simply because I look at the system clock in the bottom right corner to see the date anyway. But of course it is just an easy flip of menu option to remove that ponderous calendar staring at me from the top right corner. The upcoming appointments are listed out in the To-Do bar and boy, did I love that feature! I have to confess I am pretty callous about looking at my calendar for the next day or even the same afternoon and when the reminder shows up, I am invariably groaning about having to go to a meeting in the middle of work. But this easy depiction stays in front of me each time I am reading mail and is so hard to overlook.

Logically, this should have come first, but the new mail configuration experience is awesome to say the least. When I installed Outlook 12 on my test machine, I had to enter ZERO information about myself, but it completed the mail setup automagically! I admit I was pretty annoyed to have to setup Outlook on my test machine each time I reimaged it since it would ask for the mail server and I had to look it up and fill up the server name. Configuring Outlook over RPC was a similar experience. Will has a great post on how the mail server names are guessed intelligently and the mail IDs derived from active directory.

Of course, the search feature was a much awaited one. I had already been using some tools like Desktop search that would look in my email archives and this feature built into Outlook is definitely a much needed one. It has a query builder that you can use to narrow your search as you wish to. The RSS feed feature is also a natural addition into the Outlook feature repertoire. Having dogfooded some internal RSS tools that integrate with Outlook, this feature is an obvious fit into the product. The RSS feed addition page is cool with a bunch of suggestions that are categorized into Technology, Sports, General News etc.

Interestingly, there is no ribbon for Outlook. I would think there isn't much complexity in the menus in the first place to warrant a simplification anyway. Tiny enhancements like a strikeout effect on the old date for an updated appointment, categorizing email in the navigation pane itself and similar improvements have lent Outlook 12 a nice overall effect.

When Bill Gates wrote the release floppies...

anutthara — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 03:11:00 GMT

Yesterday, I happened to attend a talk by Lori Brownell on "Leading at Microsoft". Lori has been at Microsoft for over 18 years and shared some of her experiences working in the company. Clearly, the most fascinating story was of an event that happened several years ago when she was new to the company. She was hired as a build engineer and her very first jobs was to make the RTM disks of a product that was about to be shipped. She had just switched jobs and here she was, a new employee hopeful of a thrilling and exciting job being made to write tons of floppy disks late on a Sunday night!!! As she was sitting in the lab, writing those floppies for release along with another colleague, thinking if she did the right thing by making a switch to Microsoft, she heard someone knock on the door. And there was BillG asking "Hi! What are you doing?". Apparently, Lori was too tongue tied to speak :) When the person with her replied to Bill that they were writing the floppies for release, Bill said "Oh wow! Can I help?" and actually sat down and helped them write the remaining floppies in the lab!! Woo hoo!

What a great example to show that there is nothing like "that work is brainless and beneath my dignity!" Oftentimes, we encounter this in the workplace where folks are not interested in doing some kind of work because they feel it does not give them the required mileage or visibility. Of course, this does not mean I start writing floppies from tomorrow (that was for my manager, just in case ;-) Obviously you have to delegate work intelligently, use time optimally yada yada, but having the conviction to do whatever it takes to get a step closer to shipping - that is solid commitment. In my org, I have had the oppurtunity to see a lot of my senior team members sometimes do the kind of stuff that you would expect to be way below their level, with a lot of sincerity and passion. But in the end what matters is that YOU are making the product ship and that has got to be the greatest feeling ever! :)

VSTS Deep dive training session

anutthara — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 09:15:00 GMT

Dinesh asked me to support training at a deep dive VSTS last week and I readily agreed. I really can't pass an oppurtunity to see how people use our product and hear their feedback. The training was in Bangalore and I have lived in Bangalore for 21 years and visiting home always feels so good :)

Chris Menegay, the guy who delivered the training was awesome and held the audience in good stead. The training material was quite comprehensive and had a lot of hands on lab exercises. It was heartening to see the audience show a lot of interest in many of the advanced functionality of VSTS too. There were a ton of qs around customization of existing functionality, writing your own plugins, which SKU gets what dlls, best practices, integrating existing systems with selective VSTS features etc. Team Build and converters were introduced on Day 2 and Day 3. A lot of qs on the internals and some fairly complex customizations were asked. Of course, we had our standard qs about case loss during migration, how Team Build uses workspaces and how we build web projects, setup projects. We will soon get a FAQ out on these issues. But overall, users were pretty wowed with the kind of integration support that Team Build gives and the handiness and robustness of the VSS Converter and I did get a lot of requests for targeted help with Team Build for building Proof of Concept scenarios. Predictably, the rest of TFS also had their share of FAQs with users asking qs about offline support for Version Control, correct usage of branching and merging, selctive backup of files in source control, customizing work item types, MS Project integration support and general qs on the object model. The profiling and code analysis tools along with web tests were undoubtedly some of the most popular features of TS and got quite a few cheers. I noticed however that we really need a document that addresses some queries around what works and what does not when you use some components as stand alone from TS. Stuff like the minimal set you require to get things up and running and also the features that you can use and stuff that you will miss if you try using components as stand alone. More on that in the coming blogs.

Interestingly, I met a couple of folks in the training with whom I had been interacting very frequently on the VSTF forums. It is curious how you form a picture of a person that you have been interacting with but have not met. One of my blog readers actually referred to me as a guy in one of his comments. I think I am now inclined to put up my pic on my blog that helps associating my name with a 23 year old girl :)

My first web chat session

anutthara — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 15:07:00 GMT

I just finished my web chat session. We had nearly 50 qs asked in an hour or so. I must say it brought back memories of exams...

As I went to the conf room with a borrowed laptop, I was nervous. Ok - I was a little more than nervous - bordering on jittery you can say. At least I was before time - I had a good 20 mins to go until the chat began. I would collect my thoughts until then I thought. As I put the network cable into my laptop, the machine just would not connect to corpnet. Troubled as I was, I had to drag my manager out of his room to fix my conn issues. It turned out I was connecting to a dead port and just had to switch the port! Now, I understood that nervousness was beginning to play on me. As I started up the machine, I realized I had not yet installed chat manager on this system. Ouch! I tried TS-ing into my dev machine, but for some reason, the perf was so goddamn slow that I could actually hear the letters being rendered as I typed! I tried installing chat manager on the laptop itself, but the msi being in Redmond , it took me a while before it was installed on the machine. In the middle of the installation, my laptop hibernated without a warning! Battery low! As I tried plugging in the power supply, I noticed that the laptop's plug had round pins whereas the sockets had flat pins. No adapter in sight. Determined to remain calm, I searched around a few offices and finally got an adapter that would interface with my plug and socket. Finally, I was ready to go no more than 20 seconds before the chat began.

As the moderator started introducing us, I felt a twang of sharp fear. Expert? He is actually introducing me as an expert; but what if I can't answer a q? What if I forget answers to basic qs like what is internationalization? That was ok - I could always msn my way through ( that's right - I did not say Google my way through :P) Yeah right! I was supposed to msn search? Like the participants can't do that themselves! Ok - if I forgot, I could reassign the q to the other experts in the room. They would not forget unlike me. But what if I can't answer any q at all? Yikes! This is exactly the way I felt before each exam! Why did I even sign up for this?

As I was lost in my paranoia, I realised that the first q had already been asked. That is simple - I can answer that, I thought. It was a straightforward q on what internationalization of s/w is. As I finished typing the answer to that one, I saw a couple of more qs that I wanted to answer - qs related to asp.net i18n. Those were interesting. As more and more qs kept coming, I did not have the time to re-experience my fears! I took some fairly nice qs and was pleasantly surprised at how interested the participants were in newer features of internationalization and all aspects of it! Qs on satellite dlls, localizing static content on web sites, using multiple cultures in a single page, differences between cultures, Unicode encoding schemes, .NET API support for the same - they all kept coming. A few tricky ones were asked too - some good gotchas in i18n. As the qs kept flowing, I did not realize that we had already spent an hour :) Sweet! I actually made through the entire chat session without being totally foxed by any q! Er - I don't want to make that sound like a miracle, but that was really the way I felt when it began. The last q was on the difference between localization and localizability. Wow! I wouldn't have missed a chance to answer that one (readers of my previous blogs know why ;-)

Now that my first time went off quite decently, I can venture to say that I really quite enjoyed it. I am looking forward to another web chat again...

I have an internationalization web chat tomorrow

anutthara — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 14:24:00 GMT

at http://www.microsoft.com/india/msdn/chat/default.aspx

Join the chat if you want to know about what internationalization is all about and how you can develop your apps for everyone around the world. :)

Hanuman - the original superhero

anutthara — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:06:00 GMT

Last week, I was out at the movies to watch Hanuman, the new animation movie by Sahara One. Having seen Goblet of Fire FDFS(1st day 1st show), I wanted to watch it again. When I landed at the theatre, I was in a dilemma since tickets to GoF were available! Those who know what booking at Prasad's is like will probably understand the shock value of getting tickets to a popular movie on Friday evening there. As I looked around, the baby monkey on the posters splashed all around won my heart and I finally got tickets for Hanuman.

Hanuman was such a great experience! It was one of the most endearing animation movies I have watched. Frankly, I wasn't expecting the animation to be superb and it wasn't. But I have to admit the overall package was admirable. The story is narrated in the familiar voice of Mukesh Khanna (the much admired Bhishma) lent to the the hero of the movie Hanuman, of course. The portrayal of Hanuman during his childhood was a big hit with the kids in the hall, many of whom had evidently come to watch it for at least the second time. The exploits of Hanuman when he grows up are shown in a very spirited manner making Hanuman succeed in winning the hearts of the viewers. Despite having heard the story a million times, I was riveted to my seat all through the 90 minutes of the movie. The dialogues are fun and the music is excellent. The episode where Hanuman goes inside a demoness and immediately comes out just to obey her word and the episode where Hanuman uproots the mountain containing Sanjeevini to carry it back are some of my favourites! :) All in all, awesome movie and the stuff that all kids and grown ups would love to watch.

Coming to think of it, Hanuman is an obvious choice in superheroes when making a movie out of Indian mythology. Among my other favourites would be Krishna of course and Ganesha. Hoping to see more of such wonderful movies again...

Our team is on Channel 9!

anutthara — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:58:00 GMT

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=143589 to see the team building Team Build! There's a short demo of Team Build that I gave along with Abhinaba We also got most of our team members on tape. Do take a look at the video - I even cleaned up my cube to give an illusion of neatness ;-)

I am back!

anutthara — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 18:08:00 GMT

Hi! After a looooong break, I am back again. So what kept me so long.....first, we had to ship beta 3 of VSTS in September. That meant the entire test team was heads down in a 4 week full test pass to ensure we run our entire colossal set of tests against the product. Second, as many of you might be aware, we are shipping VS 2005 soon. So, I was involved in a separate activity to test all Team Build dependencies that we had on VS 2005 features, which is really a long list. Team Build is built right on top of MSBuild, the build engine that ships with VS 2005 - so we needed to ensure all possible dependencies are covered and tested with respect to MSBuild. Other than that, there was some intensive testing around building web projects and C++ projects.

Last but certainly the most enjoyable, was the heavy involvement with newsgroups soon after Team Build B3 release. Boy! Did we receive a lot of interest! In fact, it was during answering posts on newsgroups, that I realised how valuable blogging can be. Very often, posts allude to blogs, many times appreciating them and asking for more info and some posts suggesting future topics for blogging. It seems to be a much more popular and faster alternative to reading reams of boring documentation! Of course, the bouquets come with the brickbats. The most unflattering comment I have seen so far on the forums said that a certain blog "was as clear as mud"! Ouch!

In my coming blogs, I would like to dwell on some Team Build specific features that have been the subject of forum posts ever so often. I would be delighted to hear from you of any such specific topic that you would be interested in. I am hoping to shed more light on some of these features in my coming blogs and would love to hear your feedback on them...as long as you don't say they are as clear as mud... ;-)

Hi!

anutthara — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:33:00 GMT

Hi! I am Anu, a tester in the Team Build team, that is a part of the growingly popular Visual Studio Team System. This is my opening blog entry and I intend to share my thoughts about my product, my team and about other general software development and testing practices in my coming blogs.

So, without much ado, lemme start off with a brief intro of Team Build (aww - I know its cliched, but then...) Team Build in a nutshell is a build lab out of the box. We offer an end to end solution for getting build bits out of checked in sources with complete integration between source control, work item tracking system and running unit tests as part of the build process.

It has been an interesting year with Team Build, but I must admit the most exciting part of the ship cycle has been after we got the beta bits out of the door and customers started using our product. That has been a real test of the product. Scenarios that I thought no one would ever try, bugs that got just round the corner, appreciation for features that we struggled to get in, tons of queries around known issues, extensibility plans - all of these began surfacing by the dozen. This proves again that the ultimate testing of a product happens at the hands of a customer. A constant evaluation and feedback system like dropping CTP bits at regular intervals is really one of the most effective ways to strengthen a product.

Do write to me if you have any thoughts to share about Team Build or VSTS or anything in general.

So long, until my next blog (which I hope is not too far away :) )...