There are many people who think Microsoft (and other companies, for that matter) hire programmers to be testers so they can write lot’s of automation. This, of course is not the case – we hire people who understand more about how computers work because...

I talk to a lot of testers at Microsoft. Testers at all levels and from all divisions. A topic that almost always comes up is the role of test at MS. It's something I've talked about before, but I want to spin the issue a different way. In many companies...

I wanted to expand on the main point of my last post – specifically on what a “layer below the GUI” means. All I mean is – don’t write automation that interacts with the GUI directly – instead, write automation that tests using an object model, or another...

I answered a few questions this week about automating GUI tests. One question was about recommendations for GUI automation tools for non-coders, and the other was about how much time to spend on the GUI in an MVC (model-view-controller) application. The...

I went through my drafts folder to pick a post to publish tonight, but none seemed appropriate, so you get nothing of interest. I finished up the "Test Test" follow up series last week and wasn't quite sure in what direction to go next. I just...

The 11th (and final) question in the Test Test asks if the organization has a culture of quality. Does everyone care about quality, or do they consider quality to be the test team's job? If everyone doesn't care about quality, how do you get them to start...

I think I can lump some ideas of how to improve #8 and #10 (Are tests built daily, and does test code have the same "rules" as dev code) from the Test Test into one post. let me put it this way. Code written to test the product is NOT throwaway...

I’m skipping #8 for a minute so I can get to #9. I hope we all agree that it’s silly to take a perfectly find manual test and automate it. It’s also silly to take something that’s highly repetitive and easily automatable and NOT automate it. So, as is...

Test #7 of the Test Test asks if testers use test case management and source control tools. The only reason I can think of an org NOT to use these tools is if they were too cheap to buy them. In that case, use one of the many free tools out there for...