This week in OneNote Test

It's been awhile since I went over what the test team as a whole has been doing. Here's a snapshot of some of the larger items on our plate right now.

First, we are still hiring! The job description is still posted at https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=1&jid=18701&jlang=EN. We've been interviewing candidates and all that entails. On what would at first glance appear directly related, but is actually not so straightforward, I was on a trip to the University of Texas at El Paso last week. Back to my native Texas and a chance to talk with some college students -it was a very good trip. Most of the students I met there were interested in testing as a career and that is very refreshing to see. I mention that it was not a straightforward result of the OneNote test team looking for folks. We have regular trips scheduled to many colleges and I happened to get to go on this one.  It’s just coincidence that we are also hiring.

We are also having a "Test Team Boot Camp" training session this week. We're focused on server logs, our sync model to Sharepoint and Skydrive, getting our automation machines running, code coverage tools, some specific test tools we have and server work in general. It's some very good self training we do to help give everyone both a broad and then detailed view of testing OneNote.

We are also refactoring our automation task library. The old code base had several branches that were largely duplicates of each other, and I never actually understood the topology of the folders used to hold the sources. So we are consolidating it all and removing any hard coded references to a specific version of OneNote. What this means from a different point of view is that essentially every source file we have is being modified, and the code review for that is quite an effort. The goal behind any refactoring project is to have the same functionality when done so we need to make sure we are not breaking any tests or causing any build breaks before checking in.

We also have some regular testing work scheduled and there are always the ongoing tasks (find and regress bugs, update documentation, investigate automation runs, respond to email requests and so on). All in all, quite a busy week.

Oh, and Friday the trick or treaters will hit our building before Halloween this weekend, so I'm looking forward to that as well!

I hope you enjoy this summary. If so, or if not, let me know.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John