[Ron]

Inspired by Gus’ recent post on testing the C# compiler, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how we test the C++ compiler.  Before I do that, though, I should talk about the organization of the VC test team to put things in context.  I’ll do that in this post and focus on the compiler in future posts.

The VC test team (VCQA) is organized into three sub teams: IDE/Box, Programming Model, and Code Generation.

The IDE/Box QA team is responsible for the parts of VC that live in the IDE such as the VC project system, C++ intellisense, and the C++ wizards and designers.  The “Box” part of this group is responsible for the QA parts of release management and other things such as setup, samples, and international aspects of the product.  In general, box areas are areas of the product that don’t have developers on the VC team.  Most of us FiveTestersFromVC are on the IDE/Box team.

The Programming Model QA team is responsible for the Visual C++ libraries (CRT, MFC, ATL) and the compiler front end.  Andy is on this team.

The Code Generation QA team is responsible for the compiler back-end, the 64-bit .NET JIT compilers, and some of the tools (primarily the Linker).  The Code Generation QA team is subdivided into 4 smaller teams: x86 back-end, IA64 back-end, AMD64 back-end, and 64-bit JIT compilers (the x86 JIT compiler lives on the CLR team).  I am the test lead for the x86 back-end team.

Next time I’ll start focusing on how we test the C++ compiler.