One of the things we allow on the OneNote test team is working from home now and then. We have tried hard to keep the process lightweight and leave the decision up to you for whether or not you can meet all your goals and work at home on any given day...

Last week I wrote about two different types of testing. One was setup testing : the very time consuming process of ensuring an application installs correctly. The other was using personas to develop tests to ensure people can use our software in specific...

One of the more easy to explain testing techniques we use at Microsoft to ensure our software meets the needs of users is that of "persona testing." Actually, personas are used to define new features first, so let’s start there. Suppose we wanted...

Imagine a feature of Internet Explorer or some other browser which would automatically delete items from its cache after some set number of days or months if they haven't been used. For sake of argument, let's say the default value is 6 months. So you...

A few astute readers pointed out I (intentionally) missed a few addins the OneNote team finished last year. Here they are: Search and Replace http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2007/06/23/onenote-search-and-replace.aspx Send to OneNote...

I was getting ready to post this list of the addins the OneNote Test Team worked on in the year 2007 as a nice summary of what we had done when I noticed two things: People on this alias may not be subscribed to my blog (shame!) but would want this...

I found a really great service which helps me catch up on my long overdue list of books I want to read. The website is www.dailylit.com and they have a fairly large collection of public domain and new books which they "get" to you. Their method of delivery...

Back in October , I made the statement that I had to transition from being an enthusiastic user of OneNote to a tester when I left Outlook to move to the OneNote team. I've been thinking about that for awhile and wanted to explain what I meant. ...

Gary Neitzke and I both discovered the same "bug" with OneNote last week. We both entered a bug with repro steps (the step by step directions on how to get a bug to occur) like this: Create a new page in any notebook Open the page setup taskbar...

One of the things I don't think I have mentioned is that in addition to testing here at Microsoft, I am in the US Navy Reserves. This is the branch of the navy that performs the "2 days per month, 2 weeks per year" types of work. During our...