Microsoft's JobsBlog

I thought Cem Kaner used to be high on the reading list. Can't see it now! Is the book out of favor these days?

Code Complete Steve McConnell, 1993

newer (2nd) edition currently out.

cheers,
Steve

I think Cem Kaner's book is really good as an introduction to testing methodologies and practices, but it doesn't necessarily represent the level of skill that most of the hiring managers at Microsoft expect from their candidates/employees.

Zoe, this is a fantastic list...is there a chance of you being able to publish a similar for people who would like to be a Software Development Engineer?

Justice - Thanks! I actually wrote a post a little while ago asking people to recommend their dev books. So as a first stop you should definitely check that out.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/05/07/128223.aspx

I look into seeing if there is a similar recommended list from some of the development leadership at Microsoft.

Take care...

Thanks, Zoe! :)

Why would you ever want to be a 'Test Anything'?

I'd rather be the one developing the software. I can't imagine anyone ever saying... "Gee, I'd really like to put in 10 hours testing other peoples code!"

Aren't those usually the jobs you get before you're let onto the software development team???

Hi Guy,

I must be one of those people you can't imagine! And in fact, I went completely the other way - I did dev work for a few years and found it fairly tedious. In dev, people were always specifying everything I had to do and there wasn't enough creativity involved in the work (it may also have been because I was writing code for communications protocols!) :-)

At the time that I was doing dev, I helped the test team validate some of the code I was deploying, and I found that I enjoyed testing a lot more than my dev work because I was able to write programs specifically to break applications. There was a lot more flexibility to what I was doing, and creativity counted a lot more.

So I have spent most of the past 12 years in test teams, writing programs that attack other programs. It's true that my code doesn't ship, but that was never a big draw for me. To me, what I do actually feels a lot like fishing - probing for target weaknesses in an application and then writing programs to bring them to the surface. (In fact, the motto on my external website is "Software testing is like fishing, but you get paid.")

If you're interested, I wrote a column on my view of dev versus test for Better Software a while back(http://www.stickyminds.com/se/S7084.asp).

You might also be interested in the articles on "monkeys" and "model-based testing" at http://www.model-based-testing.org. I would recommend http://www.model-based-testing.org/intelligent.pdf as a start.

Best regards,
Harry Robinson
Test Architect
MS Engineering Excellence Team

What a great insight! Thanks Harry! :)

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