Although I will never work at microsoft, although definitely not at the main campus since I have no intention of moving off the East Coast of the US, it was interesting to get a glimpse at how the company looks at Testing and Testers. Considering that they are often used as an example of how not to make software and release, considering the bugginess of some of their releases, I found the evolution of the QA positions in the company to be illuminating. I never thought they put this much thought into it.
The examples were nice, sort of like Lessons Learned From Software Testing, another of my favorites, and in some cases were pretty funny. Seeing how software is made behind the scenes is not as messy as sausages, but it can be as interesting.
One of my favorite chapters was Chapter 5 - Functional Testing Techniques, not just because I saw Bj Rollison give part of the chapter as a talk to the STPCon in 2008, but because I like the detail of examples and clear definitions of Equivalence Partitioning and Combinatorial Analysis; subjects I sometimes I forget about. I'll be rereading this chapter now and again to catch up on those testing techniques, as they are not ones I have done a lot of during system testing in the past.
It's not often I find a test book that gives me material I can look at now and in the future, this book is one that has found a fast place on my bookshelf at work.
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