Hello out there.  Welcome to our new weblog.  Notice I said “our”.  We are five folks in the Microsoft Visual C++ testing organization and this blog is an experiment in group weblogging.

Our group started as a book study group.  We would get together for an hour a week to discuss a common book that we were reading.  We recently finished going through How to Break Software and were looking for our next book when we got the idea to try something different and this weblog is the result.

So, who are we?

Barton - Our esteemed QA manager
Michael - A tester on the IDE team.
Rob - A test lead on the IDE team.
Ron - A test lead on the Compiler Back-End/Tools team.
Rui - A tester on the Project System team.

How will we keep things straight since there are five of us?

Our initial idea is to preface each of our posts with our name like so:

[Ron] I'm Ron and I'm writing this initial post.  I'm a test lead for the x86 Back-End/Tools team.  My team is responsible for testing the x86 version of the VC++ Compiler Back-end (a.k.a. c2.dll) and other tools like the Linker, Editbin, and Dumpbin.  I've been in this position for about a year now.  Prior to joining the back-end team I worked for about 6 years on the IDE side of VC++ QA and prior to that I spent a couple of years in Developer Support.

Other members of our group will be posting a little bit about themselves in future posts.

So, what will we do on our weblog?  We plan to talk about issues that get raised in our work testing Visual C++.  We don't have anything more specific in mind than that.  Feel free also to ask us questions in the comments for our posts (start with this one if you like).  We'll do our best to answer them.

Let's see what happens...