I See The Light & I'm Walking Towards It!

No, I'm not dying, and I'm not about to move groups, but as this week wraps up, a couple of really AWESOME things happen here for me and my team, that I'm really excited about, and I think you should be too!  Okay, really, one you'll be happy about and the other you will probably care less about.

First, I'm down to only 9 tests left to automate for Whidbey.  We started this product cycle with a plan of automating all pri0, pri1 and pri2 tests.  It was an ambitious goal, seeing that we walked into the Whidbey product cycle behind the dev's.  They had almost a year of coding headstart on us, so we were playing a catch up game the entire product cycle.  It's not fun when features have to be cut because there isn't enough QA resources to adequately test them.  And while that didn't happen too much, some really great ideas for Whidbey were punted to Orcas because we didn't have time to take them on.  Over the last 3 years, we've built an automation test infrastructre from scratch, and then automated 4300 tests.  We've also learned a lot in that time about what kind of tests work best, what issues we run into the most, and how to create a very robust test infrastructure.

The other light, the one you guys will be more excited about, is the release of Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey), to hit the streets on November 7th.  MSDN subscribers, ASPInsiders and other such influencers may be able to get it earlier, but no promises there.  There is a cool site that has all sorts of info about the launch at https://www.microsoft.com/events/2005launchevents/default.mspx  I'm going to try to make the Seattle launch event, but not sure yet who's organizing it, so I'm not sure who I need to talk to! ;)