Testers Get Respect!

I saw this post and it got me thinking how difficult it is test anything. Testers deserve lots of respect. Testing is hard work. It requires a scientific mind, serious attention to detail, and extreme patience. While every effort is made to test SharePoint in a holistic fashion, you may find that you are the first person to test your particular scenario. There are simply too many niches to test everything. That said, it's important to perform your own testing sometimes. That's particularly true when it comes to capacity planning. That's because no one understands how your users use your system better than you and no one understands your planned hardware purchase better than you. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of resources out that you can use to ramp up quickly on testing WSS/MOSS. I learned this the hard way. If you saw Joel Oleson's post about this you'll know that our team just completed a very large testing effort. I spent many weeks trying to figure out how I was going to approach this effort. I want to save you the same trouble. In the coming days I will post a series of posts on how you can perform your own capacity planning testing effort using the publicly available SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population ToolKit and it's downloadable testing suite. I'll need a few days to get this all together, but wanted to give you a heads up that is coming.