New tester on the OneNote test team

We welcomed a new tester to the team this week (Hi Jenny!). There is a bit of work that we have to do before she started and since this blog is also about working here at Microsoft, I thought perhaps this would be kind of interesting.

First, we had to get her a couple of machines in her (temporary) office. One machine will be used to host her enlistment and run Hyper-V. I've mentioned this type of machine before: lots of RAM, three large hard drives (1-2TB each, IIRC) and a quad core processor. We also got a second machine which is much more indicative of a "real world" machine - much less RAM, only one hard drive, etc… to use as her "dogfood" machine.

I mentioned this is a temporary office for her. We will move to other offices within our current building later this week. This is part of a planned move to better align teams now that Office 2010 is out the door. This affects Jenny in two ways. First, she will be sharing an office until we move next week. Second, we only have one monitor for her. We give everyone two monitors and wanted to hold off on a hardware order for a secondary monitor until after the move (no need to pay to move it twice). This also explains why we don't have a tablet PC for her yet.  There won’t be much for her to do for packing.  The company that moves all our gear around handles the machines for us. 

Throw in a mouse and keyboard and needed cables and she's all set for hardware for now. (And thanks but no thanks to the person who wanted to "donate" a keyboard with a broken "N" key. I think JeNNy would have noticed fairly quickly :) ).

I'll just mention in passing that we also had to get a chair and desk and other items like that for her. One nice thing about Microsoft is that office supplies (staplers, pens, etc…) are available on each floor of each building in copy rooms. Just walk in and get what you need.  She can grab what she wants any time.

New testers here get a mentor assigned to help them through the first few months on the job. Her mentor also installed some of the basic tools we use ( our bug database tool, Office 2010, some other applications and so on) just because it can be hard for new folks to track down the exact network location where all the installation programs are.

Now when she starts, she should be able to jump right into testing OneNote!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John