I am working as a SharePoint QA. We developed the Status Reports project. It is basically used to collect the weekly status for all the projects. You are allowed to submit the status for any project only if you are a member or owner of that particular...

Last week found me at CAST thanks to Jeff Atwood on behalf of Stack Exchange ( now with a tester-centric site !). Thanks, Jeff! You might remember I went to CAST last year and came back way impressed; this year's CAST managed to actually surpass my...

Last week found me braving the Grand Rapids, Michigan summer (heat! humidity! sun! loved it!) to attend my first CAST. While I propped it a couple years ago , I didn't actually make it until now. The short version: CAST is awesome, conference proceedings...

We have a set of clocks counting down the time until our next big milestone, one where all the testers are, one by the devs, and one by PM. I just noticed that they tell a story: PM reaches the end of the milestone first; Dev reaches it next;...

I'm on Twitter now; @humbugreality if you're interested. No promises whether I'll post there more frequently than I am currently doing here; so far I've twittered two jokes and am wondering what to say next. Judging from the tweets I've seen, Twitter...

Last fall Jerry Weinberg sent me a review copy of his scifi novel Mistress of Molecules . I pretty much read it straight through, and then didn't blog for six months so never posted my review. So here goes: I enjoyed it! Although I guessed the major...

I've been super busy talking with as many testers and leads on my team as I can, gathering data on what is and is not working for them. I'm completely unsurprised to learn that, as with many other teams I've talked with, they're having problems understanding...

Seeing Microsoft from the inside, I often don't understand what is going on. Sometimes, however, it's just beautiful! Recently I discovered that VPN no longer worked for me, so I dropped by Security to see what was wrong. Therein ensued a journey of...

This particular one is more of a hardware defect than a software defect but it's a good story nonetheless. I was working at a major company that had just gotten into the PC business. This was early in my career. We had been shipped a prototype of...

Recently I saw a way to describe any particular stress test that I liked: First, define the sets of qualities you care about: Input Execution entry point Resources Validation for example. Next, define the qualities within each...

Earlier this semester my capstone (= senior project) group wanted to print a 30-page Word 2007 document we'd been working on for a couple months. After struggling with the ink and paper issues of two printers, we finally held the document in our hands...

David Treadwell once advised me to take a job where I knew what I was doing about fifty percent of the time and would be completely clueless the rest of the time, because that would be a good balance between comfort and extreme learning. Alan Page says...

Hmmm...I start a build and all eight of my cores gets busy - what's up with that? <g/>

I've talked with several people recently about how they can increase their chances of making it through their upcoming interviews at Microsoft. After noticing definite patterns in their questions, and in my answers, I decided to record them here where...

My first week on Windows Phone went great! Not that I did much of anything other than set up my new computer (eight processors! 6GB RAM! 1.3TB HD!), figure out how to build and run product and test code, and start getting acquainted with my new team....

We were seeing weird issues for Microsoft Systems Management Server's (SMS) Software Update Reports like sometimes the reports would show a negative number of compliant machines or a negative number of machines where Updates had been downloaded. The customer...

My favorite bug was an issue that would cause a test hang on roughly 1 machine in 100 running overnight stress. All the test threads would get stuck making TCP connections, and we’d see the same memory signature in the kernel heap which indicated one...

2010 is going great for me! 2009, on the other hand, was the sort of year I wouldn't wish on anybody - and that I wouldn't give up for anything. The amount I learned about myself, why I do things the way I do, and what I could do about it - and what...

I was testing a radar system that controlled the guns and missile launchers on a naval combat ship. The radar system consisted of a Fore subsystem, Aft subsystem and a Weapons subsystem. After several months of testing we discovered that if we started...

Our application (web based) is built in .Net and Infragistics. It has 6 modules. One module is similar to product management, in this we need to enter product title, product details, etc. Newly created product names appear on the homepage. So while testing...

The one that says that it is erasing my old email when it really isn't! I like to erase old email. For some reason the web mail I am using will not allow me to delete my old email. One day I spent over an hour attempting to delete old email, when I...

Our team uses a web-based tool to test our product. In one page, we can input tree-like structured data. In some conditions, we have to create a child under one node of that tree by clicking a drop-down list to select the type of the child object. The...

In one application there is a small line of whitespace between a custom toolbar and the menu; clicking this whitespace causes an unhandled exception due to a null pointer. I found this by accident just trying to access certain options. This is my favorite...

Of all the bugs I've came across I'll never forget this one because it was so severe and easy to miss. Later, when I was a Test Lead it was the first thing I added to my sign-off checklist… A few years ago, our product was practically out the door when...

When my first test manager left Microsoft he told the team this was his favorite bug and it is easy to see why (testers are often asked about their favorite bugs when they leave). On his first week on the job one of my friends hit a crash in the speech...