Engineering Lead

drwill — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:04:04 GMT

In the last six months, I've transitioned from a QA Lead to an Engineering Lead position. I'm still a persistent and tenacious driver of quality. Now I get to influence the development process as well. It is a great opportunity for me to optimize development for the benefit of quality, as well as a great career challenge.

I began my career as a product support engineer. I was a temporary Microsoft employee for two years. Despite all the negativity you might associate with that, I found it to be an excellent opportunity for me to learn and prove myself. I started in phone support for Windows 95. It was 2 weeks before Win95 was released and it was a very exciting time. Product Support Services (PSS) was a fantastic environment for me to learn. There was a lot of knowledge about Windows, networking, memory management, etc. I just soaked it in. So many people were happy to help others learn. It was easy to find experts. It was the ideal environment for me to learn since I could ask dynamic questions of an expert.

After 10 months of that, I knew I needed a change. Although I enjoyed helping customers, the number of unique issues I encountered on a regular basis wasn't growing. I was tired of hearing about how these issues negatively impacted customers and I wanted to go to the product team to find these issues before they were released.

So I became a manual tester. My job then was as close as I've ever been to the persona we use to to design our Test Case Management product. I tested third party applications to make sure they continued to work on new versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. Next I worked on NetMeeting, testing the multi-conference scale and configurations.

During those two years, I was fascinated with what one could do with programming to automate things. Whether it was a simple Excel macro to make a compelling report, a log parser to normalize disparate log formats, or automation to more quickly test an application... I was hooked. I think at our core, all programmers are a bit lazy and we're attracted to the idea we can invest a bit in an application or script to do work for us. :)

I finally made my entrance into the world of programming as a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) and became a full time employee. Back when I started it wasn't the most common type of tester we have at MS. SDETs are developers who use their programming knowledge to test the product. It could be API testing, performance, or scalability. We've even tried to automate UI tests with many essential attempts and failures over the last decade. We learned a lot of lessons and each iteration gets a bit better than before.

I've worked on many different MS apps as an SDET including Microsoft Works, MSN Small Business, ActiveSync (desktop sync for Windows Mobile), and Exchange ActiveSync (wireless sync for Windows Mobile).

Eventually I became an SDET Lead. I didn't think I'd like being a people manager, but I've learned differently since transitioning. More on that in a future blog. As an SDET Lead I championed quality, trained new testers, triaged bugs, and took part in product design. My goal was to drive for quality at every stage.

It was difficult to convince my development leads to change their approach. Now that I'm an Engineering Lead, I have the authority to make direct changes up stream. I'm not out to ruin development at the expense of quality. Now I feel I can make both better. Scrum and agile have been a great guide for bringing that to my team.

Introduction

drwill — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:30:00 GMT

My name is David R. Williamson and I work at Microsoft in the Visual Studio group working on Enterprise Test Tools.

Software testing is my gig because I'm really passionate about software that works. As a software user, I get easily annoyed with bugs and poorly designed UI. Anything that slows me down from getting what I want done is just unacceptable. So, as a software engineer my mission is to prevent and find the bugs and annoying behavior early enough so the team can fix it. I'm also passionate about improving engineering practices to yield better productivity and a predictable development cadence.

My career in software development started in Product Support Services. I answered daily calls to Microsoft's support department for Windows 95 just as it launched. It was an amazing opportunity to learn about Windows and talk to customers first hand. (It was also an opportunity to learn how to prank my friends' computers which has brought endless enjoyment.) Starting out there was important in my development because I learned right away the pain software users go through when things don't go the way we want. After about a year of that, I decided it was time to get to work on finding the problems so my customers would be happy and not have to call in. Ever since, I've been a tester and a programmer. My role has changed over the years some, but the heart of my passion is still around raising the quality bar.

Today I'm an Engineering Lead. I manage a team of developers and testers at the feature level. I love both sides of development and quality assurance, so this is the perfect role for me. I enjoy working with individuals to help them grow and find the right opportunities for them to develop. I strive to create an engineering environment where both dev and test feel they are contributing to an amazing product, making steady progress towards the product deliverables, and enjoying their time doing it.

Cheers,

Dave

drwill's daemon : Bio

Engineering Lead

Introduction