An Insider’s Look at Microsoft’s Software Testing

A lot of people dream when they think about working at Microsoft - You get free pop, right?  Well, not really.  More than that, you are building software that is used the world over, influences millions, and has huge worldwide impact.  Plus it doesn’t hurt that it pays well to work for Microsoft.  Imagine if you are building the .NET framework, you are building a tool that is used to build tools for the world.

Did you ever want to take a look inside Microsoft to see how they build and test these puppies?  Here is a brief glimpse at how important quality is to Microsoft, and how hardcore their testing is:

Microsoft supports all software for at least 10 years after the date of its release.  For testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer, they have ~105,000 test cases and ~505,000 functional test scenarios covered.  Their team has approximately 1.4 testers for every 1 developer.  Why? Because, They take quality pretty seriously at Microsoft, and because they have a lot of very hard requirements that necessitate careful planning and work to ensure high quality.

Also, Microsoft built their own in house testing software called "MadDog".  MadDog runs on 1200 machines and will identify free machines in the lab, automatically format and re-image them with the appropriate operating system, install the right build on them, build and deploy the tests selected onto them, and then run the tests.  Wow!  Here is a picture-

Now everyone knows there is a running joke about Microsoft software, how buggy it is, you know, blue screen of death, right?

Read more about it at  Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer

Are you really testing your code properly?

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