Microsoft Tester Center Blog

So Long, Tester Center

ronpih — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:22:09 GMT

A few years ago, some of us testers at Microsoft got together to try to make an idea happen. That idea was to give a public facing view of some of the neat things that were happening in the Microsoft testing world. It was a diverse group of folks. Some of us were from the Visual Studio Team Test product group (this was the business unit that funded the initial effort). Some of us were from the test part of the Engineering Excellence group. Some of us were just testers who heard about the effort and thought it would be cool to help out. It was a pretty exciting time when we initially launched the site. That was probably the high point of the effort. We had content that we thought was interesting. There were articles on testing topics in the MSDN library, a Tester Center forum, testing book reviews, white board videos, Microsoft tester personas, a calendar of upcoming testing events. We paid a columnist to write a regular column on testing topics. We even had professional brochures that we would hand out at internal events.

After the initial site launch, though, it became harder and harder to maintain the initial enthusiasm and vision. Re-orgs happened and a big part of the initial team left the effort. When the economy had a downturn, the Tester Center budget was one of those extras that got cut. Changes in the MSDN content and web site organization were optimized for product-specific developer centers rather than non-product sites that weren't about development. And, those of us who were still trying to make Tester Center work had more demanding day jobs that took more of our discretionary time.

Recently, we were asked to re-evaluate the viability of Tester Center. The numbers weren't encouraging and, from a business perspective, we had to admit that it really didn't make sense to keep trying to make it work. The world has changed from what it was when we started the project. Back then, we didn't have as many testing-oriented blogs, twitter, facebook, testing conferences, training, and the number of current testing communities and professional organizations. For our part, we lost our funding for vendors to prep the content and so we spent an lot of time just learning how to get content through the MSDN content publishing system - no mean feat. The ideas, experiences, and conversations from and among testers at Microsoft are a lot more important than figuring out how to format an article so the tools that push content to MSDN won't choke on it. Clearly, we’d rather put our limited time in the former.

And so, we've decided to let Tester Center go. This shouldn't be taken as a sign that testing is on the decline at Microsoft, though. All of the team formerly known as Tester Center retain our passion and optimism for the future of testing as a profession and at Microsoft. We will be putting our energy in other testing efforts and projects. We will continue to blog (see Alan's, Anita's and Ron's blogs) and encourage other testers to do the same. You can follow some of us on Twitter and look for us at testing conferences. We'll be around.

One project that caught our eye and that we encourage you to check out is the Expert Testers blog – a collaborative blog with content from various testers throughout Microsoft. This is very much in the original spirit of Tester Center but updated for the current world.

To all of you who visited the site and the Microsoft folks that helped work on the project over the years, a big thank you. We all appreciate the experiences we’ve had, the people we’ve met, and the lessons we learned trying to make it work.

So Long, Tester Center

ronpih — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:22:01 GMT

A New Place for Testing Questions

Alan Page — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:56:23 GMT

As we mentioned in the last post (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/testercenter/archive/2011/05/02/software-testing-forum-updates.aspx), we are closing down the MSDN software testing discussion forums. I haven’t heard too much of an uproar, but if you have questions or concerns, please let us know in the comments.

If you’re reading this on the Tester Center page, you’ll also notice that we are having some issues pulling format from the blog onto the tester center home page, but we will try to take care of that as soon as possible.

In the meantime, check out http://sqa.stackexchange.com/. I’m a big fan of the Stack Exchange platform, and think this site will evolve into a great site for testing, quality assurance, and test tool discussions. Please check it out and contribute.

Software Testing Forum Updates

Alan Page — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:57:37 GMT

We recently made a decision to close down the software testing discussion forum on MSDN. It was fun while it lasted, but frankly, the questions were drifting away from testing, and we weren’t doing a great job at all getting answers for people quickly. The forum is archived here, for continued browsing (and availability to search engines).

The good news is that there are many other great Q&A sites for software testing available for your testing questions. Two of my favorites are:

SQA Forums (http://wwww.sqaforums.com) is a thriving community for test questions
Software Testing Club (http://www.softwaretestingclub) continues to grow and provide a forum for learning about testing

I’d also like to put in a plug for the soon to go live Stack Exchange software testing question and answer site. I’m a huge of the Stack Exchange technology and think this site will be a great place to ask (and answer!) questions about software testing and test tools. Current information on the site is here (I’ll post a link to the real site when it’s available).

Also – please keep in mind that questions about Microsoft’s own testing technologies are always welcome on some of these other forums:

Thanks for your support of the forums up to this point. Please continue to ask questions, and provide feedback to the forums through this blog. We’d love to hear from you.

Suggestions and Feedback for Tester Center

Alan Page — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:53:05 GMT

We’re in the middle of a tester center working meeting right now. We have loads of content and changes we’re working through, and although you may not have noticed, subtle (and not so subtle) changes continue to propagate the site.

One thing we have decided to do is remove the send feedback link from tester center. Rather than have an email link (that spammers just love!), we’ll take feedback directly from this blog. For now, you can reply with suggestions to any open blog post, but if traffic picks up, we’ll set up a suggestion box.

What kind of feedback and suggestions are we looking for?

The short answer is “pretty much anything” (although we don’t have to implement your suggestion).

The longer answer is that we’re looking for things like the following:

Technical articles – if you have written an article that you’d like hosted on our site, let us know. We’ll follow up to see if it fits and work with you on editing, etc.
Links we should add – we have a lot of community content, so if you know of something relevant we should add, let us know
Blogs – have a good testing blog that aligns well with tester center, let us know
Site feedback – including layout, fit and finish, etc. If you’re reading this, you’re a tester; and if you’re a tester, you probably have found flaws in our site. Post them here, and we’ll make sure they’re addressed.
Time – if you want to help out on a more regular basis, let us know – we’d love to talk with you. (Note for MS employees: reading this blog – find the tester center working group in the address book and email us directly)

That’s it for now – we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Ch ch ch changes…

Alan Page — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:56:59 GMT

We made some updates to the tester center site recently. Feel free to poke around and let us know what you think (the comment section of this blog works perfectly for that sort of thing).

Probably the coolest new feature is the “content rotator” at the bottom of the main page. It’s a pretty nifty way to see a lot of different content in a small space.

More stuff coming in the next few weeks – keep your eyes peeled!

Book Bytes: Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, Second Edition

Alan Page — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:53:49 GMT

Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, Second Edition

By Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas with Matt Hargett

This book takes the reader through the reasons why unit testing is a good idea, shows how to get started writing unit tests in C# with NUnit, and then goes deeper into the subject with chapters on aspects of unit testing like boundary conditions, mock objects, design issues, and gotchas. This is a great first book on unit testing. There is also a version available aimed at Java/JUnit. Reviewed by Ron Pihlgren

Book Bytes: Testing Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools

Alan Page — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:52:42 GMT

Testing Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools

By Robert Binder

Despite the title, this book isn't really just for testing OO software - Binder's patterns of software test are as important for testers to know as design patterns are for developers. Binder also covers a lot of the theory behind model-based testing. The drawback with this book is the size - over 1200 pages. Reviewed by Alan Page

Book Bytes: A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design

Alan Page — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:50:36 GMT

A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design

By Lee Copeland

If you want a good overview of an armful of effective test techniques, Lee Copeland's Practitioner's Guide is a great place to start. In addition to covering equivalence classes, combinatoric testing and state transition (model-based) testing, Lee gives an objective view of exploratory testing that explains the benefits and drawbacks. Reviewed by Alan Page

Book Bytes: The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Alan Page — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:47:25 GMT

The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

By Marc McDonald, Robert Musson, Ross Smith

The book and it’s site (www.defectprevention.org) strive to harness the collective wisdom of the community and find new ways to prevent defects, moving the detection of defects closer to their introduction. Written by experts with over a century of software development experience among them, this book distills hard-won lessons into a set of actionable lessons that will help deliver better-quality software.

Upcoming Events

Alan Page — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:20:46 GMT

In case you haven’t noticed, we updated the “Testing Events” section on the Tester Center page. There are some great events for testers on the horizon, so if you’re interested in checking out a conference, check out the list!

Also – if you know of an upcoming conference that we don’t have listed, please leave a note in the comments section and we’ll see if we can add it to the list.

In other news, look for some content updates in the next few weeks.

Tweaking and Cleaning

Alan Page — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:23:27 GMT

It’s probably not obvious, but we’re still working on Tester Center. In fact we have a whole pile of cleanup work and additions that should hit the live site in the next week or two.

At the same time, we’ve been working on content for the software testing articles in the library. This has been quite a learning experience for us, as the process to go from word document to content that will work with the MSDN content system is full of bumps and stop signs. We’re slowly getting better at it (we’re testers, not content publishers!), and expect to have most of the learning pains behind us shortly.

If you have questions about Tester Center, or have ideas for content, please feel free to let us know in the comments section to this post.

Testing Magic

Alan Page — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:12:11 GMT

Careful observers may have noticed changes trickling into tester center over the last few weeks. A group of us are meeting regularly and working through the content backlog (and bug list) and freshening up the site.

I’d like to highlight one article recently posted to the test library – it’s Josh Poley’s article on Magic Numbers. It’s a comprehensive list of numbers every tester should know about when testing inputs.

We’re back…this time we mean it

Alan Page — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:54:18 GMT

Some of you may have noticed that we have new content on TesterCenter, We are slowly getting back into the swing of things, and expect to see more frequent updates happening soon.

New this month is a bug story about Multi-Threading, and we have several others in the works (the hard part for us is getting the papers into the correct format for the msdn library).

Even though content updates have been slow, I’m happy to report that the Software Testing Discussion forums on MSDN have remained active. If you haven’t been there yet, go ahead and ask (or answer) some questions.

Finally, if you have any other questions about tester center, or have contend you’d like to see, please let us know.

Tester Center Is Back

ronpih — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:15:00 GMT

Well, it took us a while but the Microsoft Tester Center is back with a newly-designed site. We know there are still a few rough edges but hey, we are a volunteer organization doing this in our spare time. We have some testing articles in the queue that aren't available yet but that's the next step. In the meantime, we'll be communicating about tester center via the "Latest From Tester Center" section of the home page and the Tester Center blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/TesterCenter. Check out the latest blog posts from our roster of Microsoft tester bloggers in the "Tester Team Blogs" section and the latest MSDN Testing Forum posts in the "Software Testing Forum" section. Give us your feedback on the site via the links in the "We Want to Hear From You" section.

-The Tester Center Team

What's Been Happening

ronpih — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:22:00 GMT

Many of you may have noticed that Tester Center hasn't been updated in a while. We are working to resolve that situation and should be starting to update again soon (with a new site design as well). In the meantime, we have created the Tester Center blog to let you know what's happening. Moving forward, we'll also post to this blog on Tester Center related news. So stay tuned, we will return.

-The Tester Center Team