Larry's WebLog

2 Years...

larsun — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 22:40:00 GMT

On August 26th, I have been working at Microsoft for 2 years. Actually it is kinda hard to believe that I have been here for so long and so short.

I would have to say it has been a pretty challenging and interesting journey so far to work at Microsoft. First of all, like everyone expected, I have learned so much in the past 2 years. Sometimes when I am talking to co-workers who are my age, we all surprised how far we came. However, the more I learn, the less I felt that I know, it is very frustrating. This is probably what this industry is all about, new technology comes and goes every day (maybe not every day).

After two years, I am glad that I made the desicion to go with MSDN team. Our team has been going through some exciting transformation for our customers, the products that will come out will be every exciting and should give our customer better experience.

Anyway, I just want to come back to update my status as a college hire. It has been great 2 years!

I am Back!

larsun — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 18:03:00 GMT

Hi, I am back!

After a long absense from the blog community, I finally have some time on my hand to start writing a new post again.

If you have not heard, MSDN just launched Microsoft Product Feedback Center on 06/29, how exciting! This cool site enables you to cummunicate with Microsoft product groups online and tell them what you think about Microsoft's new products, such Whidbey Beta 1. Please check it out and let us know what you think about this idea.

In the last 5 days, Product Feedback Center has attracted more than 1500 new users. Being one of the two testers on this project, I feel very happy that users really embrace this idea.

Anyway, I will keep this one short and enjoy July 4th this Sunday. Have a great Independence day, everyone!

Intro

larsun — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 22:29:00 GMT

Hi everyone:

This is a delayed introduction for myself, let me get it started quickly.

My name is Larry. I graduated from Northwestern University in June 2002, since then I have been working @ MS on the MSDN Test team as a Software Design Engineer in Test for ... one and half years now... (wow, that's a long time!)

Life in the workplace is dramatically different from attending a college. First of all, the biggest difference is the crowd I am interacting now on daily basis is probably 10-15 years older than me on average; in addition, most of these people are REALLY good at what they are doing and they have a lot of passion for the technology. Secondly, I was once a poor student (not that bad, I had couple jobs while I was in school); but now, living on my own without parents' support and enjoy what I am learning and doing on daily basis (most of the time).

Working right after college in a big company like Microsoft is not a very easy thing. People here expect you to perform and take great responsibility to make a difference in a product. Therefore, a college hire would have a lot of pressure to perform on par with other experienced senior co-workers. This actually to me have a lot of benefits:

- Learn new technology and tools faster
- More satisfaction when getting things done (afterall, many people in the world are using the product)
- Easy access to many industry experts and gurus (yeah, I love this part)
- Great learning environment for any inexperienced person

Anyway, I will stop now. Since I am just taking a little break from work.

NUnit vs. Your Own Unit Tests

larsun — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 22:56:00 GMT

Lately, I have been surrounded by NUnit in my daily conversations.

1. It is probably that I am a tester, I somehow got to write/improve some unit tests;
2. NUnit has quickly become a general practice (standard) among my product team where more developers, PM and testers have been pushing this neat practice;
3. NUnit has grown out of its design role among my test organization (I will explain later in this post)

First of all, you can find NUnit here. Let me introduce NUnit to people who have not used yet.

A simple test can be created with following few lines of code:

[TestFixture]
public class SampleTest
{
   [Test]
   public void MyTest()
   {
      Assertion.Assert(“This is MyTest“, 1=2);
   }
}

If you need more information about NUnit, please check out their documentation.

In addition to the NUnit which developers and testers can use for Windows-based applicaiton, NUnit has a version for ASP.NET (hear from my co-workers, I believe that it is still in beta) as well.

What have made NUnit a such interesting tool is that testers can leverage NUnit to do some cool testing practices.
- NUnit attributes can be extended by writing custom attributes by developers and testers;
- With a great number of unit tests, anyone can write a not-so-difficult .NET application with Reflection to discover NUnit unit tests by their attributes and invoke them one by one.

The advantages of using NUnit in normal testing scenarios are:
- Without too much code, testers can acquire coverage number on applications with an instrumentation tool;
- A suite of NUnit unit tests can set the minimum requirement for a code's minimum functional screening; therefore, this ensures that tester will not spend time on a broken build;

I think I will stop here for the day. As of myself, I am still exploring NUnit, I have been using it for a while now; however, with much more possiblity NUnit presents with other great tools, a tester nowadays can achieve many things without too much effort.

Performance test & a little bit of something else

larsun — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 00:25:00 GMT

Lately, I have been doing a great deal of performance testing. In fact, I am kinda glad that I had the opportunity and time to get good at it. I have only been working at MS for one and half years, a lot of the tasks we do daily here are still kinda new and exciting to me. For example, performance testing is not as easy as some people may think it is. There are so many factors which can affect the testing itself as well as the result. Most importantly, the purpose of a performance test is to measure the scalibility and architecture of an application. Sometimes, I even surprised at the conclusion we came to. All I have to say, “Performance testing is a science!”

What made the performance testing a science in my own mind is that the tester has to understand what he/she is going after, what kind of steps he/she needs to take to get there, and most importantly, how to interpret so many numbers a tester gets back from running the test. Here is a simple list of things a normal performance testing would need:

- Client(s) as computers which would run the test
- Target as the object a tester want to measure
- Performance Counters as the things someone need to pay attention to
- Duration as the length of the test which can vary dramatically from few minutes to several days; in some extreme case, even few months
- Warmup and CoolDown Time as the time the Target would get ready to be stressed and “Attacked”
- Numbers as the result a tester would get back from running a performance test
- Conslusion as the analysis of those numbers

If you haven't noticed yet, I was trying to create a cool acronym with the first letters of each term. Have a nice day, all! Hopefully you would find this post interesting.

P.S. My friend and I have been going to Applebee's lately for its Happy Hour menu, all I have to say is “Man, it is good!”

My first Blog!!!

larsun — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:41:00 GMT

Exciting!!! I finally have a blog of my own, yeh! All the sudden, I can post my own thoughts and other cool things in my own “publication”. Since I have never felt that I would ever be a good enough writer to publish anything, this is just a such remarkable event.

Anyway, since this is my first blog. I guess that I will keep it short. For a while, I had a not-so-positive impression about having someone's personal and sometimes random thoughts online for the entire world. I used to think that who would care about someone else's thoughts afterall. However, after reading many people's blogs, I actually like the idea of recording one's own feeling and thoughts at a particular moment some place on World Wide Web. It is such a cool way to communicate and exchange ideas with people who are on the other side world (Probably 12 time zones different than mine!)

Since I never got used to write a long story about anything, I will take a break now!

P.S. I will also write some of my posts in Chinese in the future, let's see how popular this idea will go!!!