Here is an interesting summary of the problem encountered by the Spirit probe on Mars. Important test lessons: “ test real-world conditions ” “ run long-haul stress tests ” “SYSTEM BEHAVIOR: Spirit began acting up last week, when it stopped sending data and began rebooting...

I published this info when I started my GotDotNet blog ; with the move, now is a good time to re-present the info: Bruce Williams I am a test developer for Indigo – current and future Web Services technology at Microsoft. e-mail : bwill@microsoft.com IM: domanite@hotmail.com

I read a post recently from a person who was disappointed that they hadn’t heard of the AppVerifier tool that Microsoft ships. So let’s fix that – if you do commercial software development on Windows, you owe it to your customers to download AppVerifier and test your product with it...

Eric Lippert has a great post describing some of his adventures with security issues in VBScript.  I particularly liked this segment: “Of course, it could be worse.  There was a bug in early versions of the CLR (which I believe was fixed before the first beta shipped, fortunately)...

In a response to my recent post on fault injection , Mark asks if I know of any publicly-available fault-injection frameworks.  Yes!  In fact, much of the fault-injection work done at Microsoft is built on top of work done by Microsoft Research, and you can also take advantage of their...

We have occasional debates here at Microsoft on the value of ‘white-box’ testing.  (For the sake of this discussion, ‘white-box’ testing means testing that takes advantage of internal product knowledge, while ‘black-box’ testing relies solely on the published API and behavior.) On the one...

I’d like to talk about one of the first lessons I learned as a tester at Microsoft: Anticipate failure investigations, and log everything. Let me tell you a fairly rambling tale of my early days at Microsoft: We’d just shipped Windows NT 4.0 (and IIS 1.0).  I’d recently moved from...

Again, while reading this same Scoble post , it got me thinking about my role at Microsoft.  When I tell people what I do at Microsoft, I say "I do software testing.  If you find a bug in a Microsoft product, it is my fault." Of course, that is a vast oversimplification.  I work...

  Prologue One of my teammates recently set up a Wiki site for my team, and I must admit that I have become quite addicted to it.  One of the pages I’ve created has been a list of common test areas, a checklist of things most of our tests will want to concern themselves with. ...

 After the Indigo team's last milestone (M4), most of our feature test teams did an analysis of the bugs in their feature area, and extracted some useful 'lessons learned' to help us improve our testing in future milestones.  Here are some of the lessons we learned: 1.      ...

I noticed at this link that folks are starting to hear (and speculate) about Indigo.  That’s cool to see, because that’s my team!  I know, I shouldn’t tease, because I’m not allowed to talk about it yet – but still, it is just cool to start getting some public recognition.  Even if...

 John Tobler talks a bit about Abstract State Machine Language (ASML) on his blog.  This is actually a really cool technology – one my test team has been looking at for a little while now, and one that I personally have been struggling to wrap my mind around.  At first I thought it...

 I was thinking about the role of test this morning.  We measure the quality of the product - but in some sense we have to take an educated guess what "quality" means.  In the end, the customer determines if it is a quality product, and they can't make that decision until we ship the...

A fairly long description of a project using TDD can be found at: http://redsquirrel.com/dave/work/babySteps/#200306 I've skimmed it, and look forward to perusing it in more depth when I have time.

 I heard a comment today that really struck home with me: "If you aren't willing to act on a metric, you might as well not measure it." This makes sense to me, and also strikes a nerve.  I know I've seen any number of metrics over the years - bug charts, task progress charts, anything...

 I believe the ultimate arbiter of quality is the customer.  In my imaginary world, I wish I could get a list of all the bugs customers will find in our product, go back in time, and fix them before release.  Needless to say, there are a few small flaws in this plan. In theory...

Keith Stobie (a test architect on my team) made a comment recently, along the lines of: "If testers aren't getting some bugs marked 'by design' and 'no repro', then they are probably being too conservative in their bug filing." This intuitively makes a lot of sense to me; the philosophy...

A new PM just joined my team, and he scheduled time to come talk to me about the role of testing in our product development.  While thinking about what I would tell him, the following (possibly unrelated) question popped into my head: "What are the special or unique skills and contributions...

 If you would like to contact me, my work e-mail is bwill@microsoft.com , my home e-mail is domanite@hotmail.com (use that one for spam, please), and you can also IM me at domanite@hotmail.com .

Ah, the first post on my public blog.  I’ve had an internal blog for a couple months now, and I’m ready to break out of my cocoon.  <grin>  Quick bio: I’ve been at Microsoft for about 7 years, pretty much always on the same team.  (I stay, the team changes.)  It used...