drwill's daemon : Software Testing

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.

Visual Studio Team System Chat – July 3rd

drwill — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:29:00 GMT

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Team Editions for Architects, Developers, Database Pros, and Testers. In addition, discuss what's new in the upcoming Orcas CTP.

We will be holding two sessions:

Join the chat on Tuesday, July 3^rd , 2007 from 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

-or-

Join the chat on Tuesday, July 3^rd, 2007 from 4:00pm - 5:00pm Pacific Time. Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones

Team System chat

drwill — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 01:08:00 GMT

Want to chat with members of the development team for Team System? We're holding a chat Wednesday the 6th of September at 10am Pacific. We love to hear from you and answer your questions. Below is the official chat invitation.

Cheers,

drwill

Visual Studio Team System Public MSDN Chat

Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope to see you there!

Join the chat on Wednesday September 6th, 2006 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific time.

To add this to your calendar, click here.

To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.

Security

drwill — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 21:31:00 GMT

I saw a news story today about Microsoft software security.

There, my first sentence is valid regardless of what date I post this. These days, when can I go a day without seeing a news story about Microsoft software security? For me as a Microsoft employee, especially one who cares so much about quality it's a little disheartening.

Over eight years ago I was a tester for NetMeeting, the conferencing software that allowed PC users to connect over a network to do voice/text chat, share a paint canvas, send and receive video, and even share out applications. The main way to connect to others was by registering your client on a server, then one could browse the list of people and find someone they wanted to talk to. You specified some information about yourself in an Options dialog and that info would show up on the directory server web site.

The web was really picking up back then and the commonality of exploits wasn't nearly what it is today. I remember realizing one day that someone could put HTML code into their user profile. At first, I thought simply of people putting <img> tags in to make pictures show up. The pictures could be really big causing the page to load slowly. They could be of adult material. Clearly Microsoft would not want that sort of thing on the directory server. As I spent more time thinking about how, as a malicous individual, I could do even more very bad things it really scared me. I saw a vulnerability and the sky was the limit.

I informed the management team of my idea. You feel really weird when you mention stuff like this, by the way, because people wonder why you think of such bad things. I'm not a miscreant, I swear! Did they respond as I hoped? Listen to my concern, discuss the implications, have someone work on a technical solution, cost the work out, and stop the problem before we shipped? No, of course not. Back then security was not a big concern for most teams. It was shrugged off as someone (me) with too much of an imagination. Who would really think to put HTML in there anyway?!

Well, beta went out and guess what showed up not one day after? Yup, you guessed it. Customers are smart! Some are even devious.

I admit, it felt good for management to come back to me for a solution. I knew this would be a problem and already put time thinking about how you'd prevent it. It's not the first time at Microsoft (or anywhere else I suspect) that someone saw a threat but was ignored. These days, threats are taken much more seriously.

There is a whole security team of experts that manage our security processes and expectations. I've been to a security talk at least once every six months in the last two years hosted by them. They really know their stuff, let me tell you, and they are learning more everyday. What they've learned over the last six years or so is changing the way we do software development. Higher standards are being implemented. Lines in the sand are being drawn. I expect HUGE changes in the next two years in how we develop software!

However, nothing will change unless our development and management teams take security very seriously. We have to change the way we prioritize features, schedule development work, and reward behavior. I hope and pray that some sort of accountability comes into practice, because irresponsible development and management practices got us here in the first place.

Back to my disheartened feeling, I'm personally sick of vulnerabilities. The truth is no matter what we do they will still be found. We can drastically reduce the number of them and I'm all for that. Certainly the fewer viruses that affect customers and the fewer number of patches they need to install will be greatly appreciated by all. Make no mistake, there will always be malicous people who look for flaws. As we continue to fix the issues that have been found and find ways of keeping new code relatively exploit-free, our products will be more secure. The hackers will have to get creative and find new types of exploits no one thought of before.

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