If it’s June it must be time for my annual “ I love the Penultimate Day of School ” blog post. As this is now my third post on the word penultimate (actually the second post was on the antepenultimate month of school ). In a sense that...

“ I love the word Penultimate ,” and I love our family’s made up Internet holiday “ The Penultimate Day of School .”  As we are now nearing the end of the antepenultimate month of school I felt it was time to make another post promoting our new holiday...

Sometimes it’s good to get outside, get your hands in the dirt, and plant things, especially if you can do it with your children. Keeps you grounded, and yes that was an intentional pun.   Office 2010 is going to be great. For the past 3.5 years...

For the past few weeks members of my team and I have been meeting with key individuals in Bing, Microsoft Online services, and Windows. In those meetings we have focused on rich telemetry. W e’ve talked about technologies to collect data, privacy concerns...

James A. Whittaker’s (JW) recent blog post “Testing in the Data Center (Manufacturing No More),” is a fun little ditty and it inspired me. Thank you James for sharing the testing is like an ER analogy. In this post JW draws an analogy that software...

This is a bit of personal musing. Feel free to skip. Originally I was going to tweet this but then I started coming up with quite a few tweets and decided a short blog would be better. There is such a thing among testers on twitter as tweeting your...

In the web services world I’ve heard a lot of really stupid things said by a lot of really smart people. I will admit, without details, that I have been guilty of saying some of those stupid things myself. I like to believe that I am learning and evolving...

I have been a big proponent of shipping services into production more frequently and conducting more testing on the code once it is in production. Those of us that support this methodology tend to call it TiP (Testing in Production). Find links to previous...

For some time now I’ve been promising to lay out all my thinking on Testing in Production (TiP). I first introduced the topic in a blog post in June 2009 titled “ Ship your service into production and then start testing! ” Over the summer I had some family...

Since I have been in software it has been readily accepted that in order to test software one needs hardware. At most software companies this means that there is a test lab filled with computers and devices to assist in the testing. My experience has...

Who in their right mind agrees to fly all morning from Seattle to Minneapolis, drive to a local software testing special interest group (SIG), talk for 90 minutes, and fly back home that same night? For a number of reasons, the most important of which...

All three authors of " How We Test Software at Microsoft ", Bj Rollison , Alan Page , and Ken Johnston actually made it for this recording.  Warning, I had a bit too much fun with my green screen.  The discussion covers how different...

Recently I ran into a friend who was reading chapter 14 of How We Test Software at Microsoft . He commented on the picture in the book of the Rackable Ice Cube container full of servers. This was pretty cool to think about purchasing servers pre-racked...

This BLOG post is a thank you to all the individuals who have read “How We Test Software at Microsoft,” and posted something on the web about it (that Alan, BJ and I been able to find that is). We are thrilled by the very positive response readers...

Alert: this post has nothing to do with S+S or operations or testing but it’s a small slice of life that I just had to share. “P” words such as penultimate, pontificate, plethora, plebian, and polyglot have failed me more than once. Have you...

Today I hosted four hours of interactive learning on S+S testing with table topics such as "Testing in Production, How far can we go?" and "Release Cadence in an S+S era." Every time I get together with smart engineers new better ideas are generated....

Think about Services shifting the Testing into Production The topic of Testing in Production (TiP) is a growing area of debate in SaaS and S+S testing groups. While I don’t personally really believe you should ship your service and then start testing...

1+1 redundancy for production services is a flawed design approach. +1 redundancy is like the kind of logic my wife uses with me when I go on an overnight business trip. She will insist that I take at least two pairs of socks in my bag even though...