Sara Ford's Weblog

As promised, I said I would ask some of the people from my team after they returned from vacation about the history of LogPass. I met with one of our SDET Leads to find out more. Here’s what I learned. Logging failure by default is a Test-Driven Development...

In our test case world, we assume a test case fails, unless we log pass. We changed our way of thinking a while ago, where we used to assume a test case passes, unless we log a failure. I wish I could give an example of a bug I’ve caught because of the...

This Thanksgiving, I went home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the first time in three years (since joining Microsoft). Of course, I had to stay a couple of nights in New Orleans to begin the trip. Being back in the Quarter made me think of this list...

DigitalBlasphemy.com is the best website I’ve seen for wallpaper. While working on webtop in college, one of my coworkers had the Fluorescence wallpaper installed on his account. As soon as I saw it, I was hooked. I have a tri-monitor setup in my office...

The problem is with this line: ‘ retval is NULL if API failed to set focus on requested window If retval.Equals(0) Then Remember, the retval for this API is an IntPtr, not an integer. Even if the IntPtr is null, the exception will not get thrown. You...

Really easy one tonight, but something ever tester working with APIs should be aware of. Even if you know better, someone else might not. Here’s a little example I threw together in the past 10 minutes to illustrate tonight’s point. Public Declare Function...

This is my first attempt at a series of “what’s wrong with this test case code” entries. Let me know what you think of this idea and if you’re interested in seeing more examples. A False Positive is defined as a test case that has been logging a passing...

This is my first attempt at a series of “what’s wrong with this test case code” entries. Let me know what you think of this idea and if you’re interested in seeing more examples. A False Positive is defined as a test case that has been logging a passing...

Here’s a collection of bumper stickers for testers written by our own Harry Robinson. My addition to the mix: Passion-driven testing: Making every line of code feel dirty. Software Testing is a second-childhood: You broke it, and I’m telling. Looks like...

Update 12/13/2004:   I won’t know whether i passed or not for another month.  The head sensei wasn’t there, so they videotaped the exam for him.  Not sure if that’s a good thing, since he’ll be able to rewind and watch everyone individually...

While working on a community app project (you’ll hear more on this later), I needed help setting the selection (and inactive selection) on a tree view.  Just a refresher from my first ever blog post , Explanation of Focus and Selection Focus: Only...

I’ve had a few questions come back to me about disabling the IDE Navigator , aka the Ctrl-Tab Dialog. Here’s how to do it: Open Tools – Options – Keyboard Under “Show commands containing:”, type in “Window.NextDocumentWindowNav” Press the Remove button...

Update 12/2/2004:  Uploaded an image from Visual Studio 2005 Beta.  Note the image below shows guidelines at column numbers 5 and 30, but the regkey value is RBG(255,0,0), 4, 29.  The Guideline column numbers are 0-based in the registry...

Technically, I’m from the Mississippi Gulf Coast , but I tell people I’m from New Orleans. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is radically different than the rest of Mississippi. It’s the New Orleans spillover and arguably the retirement community for the city...

Halo 2 kicks butt. Yep, I was one of those waiting in line an hour before the company store opened to ensure I would be playing Halo 2 when I got home from work.  Alas, I was only able to play an hour last night. ::sobs:: Things I like about Halo...

Why is a nightly called a nightly? A nightly is a test case that must be run every time there is a new build. Since a new build is published every night, these tests are run nightly, hence the name. Other teams call these tests Acceptance or Self-Host...

ScottGu , the ASP.NET Product Unit Manager, has put together quite a detailed overview of the ASP.NET testing team’s world, which maps closely to my team’s world. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2004/10/28/249458.aspx Check out the Maddog screen...

Definitions I’ve seen the terms “Test Plan” and “Test Specification” mean slightly different things over the years. In a formal sense (at this given point in time for me), we can define the terms as follows: Test Specification – a detailed summary of...

Marie has done an awesome job writing up the most complete “how to file a good bug report” I’ve ever seen on paper: http://blogs.msdn.com/productfeedback/archive/2004/09/27/235003.aspx Two things I really want to emphasize: Good bug titles – we have lots...

I’ve been testing the new Code Snippets feature heavily the past couple of days. Meghan (Editor Dev Lead) and Sean (Editor PM) have good information about Code Snippets on the VS Editor blog: Code Snippets – a way to be more efficient in writing code...

I’m getting close to finishing all of our manual test cases for our Full Test Pass, which has helped me tremendously to learn about my new feature area. Here is my list of tips and tricks that I’ve collected over the past couple of weeks: Tip #1 – Code...

On September 1st, I stepped down from my role on the Visual Studio Accessibility Team. This month marked my 3 year anniversary working on Accessibility. I feel that I have done everything that I could do in this space. And I saw such passion and dedication...

I started reading The Dark Tower series about 4 years ago when Wizard and Glass came out, so I haven’t known Roland and his ka-tet as long as some other Constant Readers have. But I can safely say I love this series as much as they do. For those of you...

Warning! This article contains spoilers. If you haven’t finished reading The Dark Tower Book VII, leave now ! Special thanks to The Dark Tower Forums . Some of the ideas in my theory about the ending come from there. Although the ideas were on the tip...

Friday last week marked my 3 year anniversary at Microsoft. I’ve been telling people that I’m starting my senior year on the Visual Studio team, to which people reply, “what happens when you graduate?” I tell them “grad school, I guess.” My feature area...