First week in Seattle: ✔

Jun 292011
 

Last Sunday, my family and I landed in Seattle airport after more than ten hours traveling.  We then settled in a temporary housing in Kirkland, with a breathtaking view on Washington Lake. So far, we are all excited and happy to be here!

On Monday morning, I was at Microsoft for the New Employee Orientation (employee that relocate have to attend the NEO). It was a pretty good way to adjust my jet lag and understand what I needed to do in order to get my administrative work done. Main blocker for us is still the social security number. In the US without a SSN you cannot get credit. Without credit you cannot get a phone, a car or a house. So our temporary situation is going to last for a few more weeks, not bad considering the current view on the LakeJ.

Being at Microsoft mothership is quite impressive, around 60’000 employees dispatched in numerous building all around the area. This is a radical change from my experience in Zurich (Switzerland) where we were “only” 30 employees.  When I learned that the Dev Center in Zurich was about to close, I decided to stay in the same group (Lync) while extending my responsibilities. This means that I am now testing Lync Response Group and Xmpp Gateway.

The Seattle area is very promising, close to mountains, forest and the Pacific Ocean. I am really looking forward to discovering this area.

 

A son, a new job and a relocation

Jan 252011
 

There have been quite a lot going on in my life the past months, following the timeline of the events:
Most importantly, my wife gave birth to a healthy and beautiful son, named Baptiste. He is already quite tall and is wearing 3 month cloth after only 1 month of life :).
Few weeks before, I learned that my office in Zurich was shutting down and that my job was relocated in Redmond / Washington.
My wife and I planned to move to Redmond in a few years but with the unexpected closure of the Zurich development center we decided to take a shortcut in our plan and to accept the relocation offer. The decision was not too hard to take and I must say that I am super existed to be working in the mothership of Microsoft. Although Zurich is a beautiful city that offers incredible life quality I was never able to get myself to the Swiss German culture, probably because I am so Swiss Frenchy :).
The most annoying part of this move will be to get so far away of my family and friends but as I learned from previous experience friendship is not a link that can be broken by long distance.
The current plan is to have my family and me moving to Redmond in end of June 2011. So until then I will enjoy having team meeting in the middle of the night with my new team :).

What am I doing? Software testing :-)

Jun 022010
 

Since I moved to Zurich, two years ago, I sadly did not have the time to see most of my friends I have in Geneva. This post will hopefully explain you what I am doing in Zurich as an Engineer in Test at Microsoft. I know that even the people who know me well do not really understand what my role is and what testing is about.  Defining testing is not quite easy so let me start by quoting Wikipedia’s definition of software testing:

Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test. Software testing also provides an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks at implementation of the software. Test techniques include, but are not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs.

To resume, I bring information about quality and objective view of the software I work on (the next generation of Office Communication Server – Response Group Service). I own the testing of some feature of RGS for this feature I should always be able to answer the question: ‘Can we ship it?’.
To answer this question I have two main approaches:

  1. Develop automated test that will run scenario at a code level, this test being automated I can make sure that no regression would be added these feature and related area.
  2. Do some manual testing on complex scenarios representing the customers most important scenarios.

 

Finding ‘bugs’ effort is only the half of my work. The other half is dedicated at understanding the defects and drive to their resolution. To do so I am helped by developers (fixing the bug) and project managers (to give clear vision on how a feature should work in every details).

As the goal of this post is to be as clear as possible in won’t go further in my explanation :-)

I hope you know understand better what software testing is how I spent my time at work.