Windows 7 - Coming Your Way
Before I hunker down to work on our next engineering challenge at Microsoft, I wanted to reflect on my experience working on Windows 7.
For the last few years I've been working at Microsoft as a test engineer. I'm sometimes asked what that means. A test engineer is someone who, well, tests things. I would classify myself as a natural tester, and I take pride in what I do. I lead a team of test engineers who test Windows graphics: everything from the HLSL compiler to the display driver model.
Growing up on a farm in rural North Carolina gave me an interesting perspective on how things work; from the herding behavior of cattle, sheep and goats, to the inner workings of complex farm equipment, I've witnessed a lot of things go wrong while working hard to make them go right. Getting a pilot's license and the healthy paranoia of staying safe in a small airplane gave me another dose of tester mentality. Writing software for 15 years helped as well.
Testers that I work with, at least in graphics, are also software developers. In essence, we are the first customers that get a chance to try out a given piece of technology before it is released to the public. Our job is discover, identify and resolve flaws before they find their way out of the factory, so-to-speak. The amount of code we generate to test a given function is often times more code than the original function itself. The kinds of issues we discover are sometimes trivial, sometimes complex, sometimes bizarre.
It takes a very special kind of mindset to perform in a test role year after year, largely because we don't get the glamor of being the creator of the code that ships and our successes, a high quality product, often end up being credited to the developers. I often equate this to things I've heard about NASA and the United States space program. Apparently NASA has many times more engineers testing things than they do building things. For every astronaut up in orbit, there are thousands of folks on the ground ensuring everything is 'nominal'...and even then there are often problems anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I respect feature development, I did that for many many years and have shipped many successful products and line of business applications in many different industries. The creativity of being 'in flow' working on something new is very appealing to me. And Microsoft developers are truly the best of the best when it comes to producing world-class code. But development without testing and high quality bars generally produces sub-optimal products. And I've been quite fulfilled in this role as a test engineer, it comes naturally to me.
I've also made many new friends. The engineers I work alongside in test at my job are easily the most intelligent and gifted people I have ever had the opportunity to work with. And over the past few years we have worked very hard to produce an operating system worthy of praise.
I look back on the Windows 7 experience realizing the depth of the technical achievement, the humbling affect of the scale of the effort, of knowing my contribution is but a small fraction of much larger force, and a smile of knowing I'll always get to remember being a part of that effort.
I think you will be very pleased with Windows 7 when it hits store shelves less than 3 weeks from today. We've all worked very hard on it.
I'm proud of our accomplishment :).
-B
For the last few years I've been working at Microsoft as a test engineer. I'm sometimes asked what that means. A test engineer is someone who, well, tests things. I would classify myself as a natural tester, and I take pride in what I do. I lead a team of test engineers who test Windows graphics: everything from the HLSL compiler to the display driver model.
Growing up on a farm in rural North Carolina gave me an interesting perspective on how things work; from the herding behavior of cattle, sheep and goats, to the inner workings of complex farm equipment, I've witnessed a lot of things go wrong while working hard to make them go right. Getting a pilot's license and the healthy paranoia of staying safe in a small airplane gave me another dose of tester mentality. Writing software for 15 years helped as well.
Testers that I work with, at least in graphics, are also software developers. In essence, we are the first customers that get a chance to try out a given piece of technology before it is released to the public. Our job is discover, identify and resolve flaws before they find their way out of the factory, so-to-speak. The amount of code we generate to test a given function is often times more code than the original function itself. The kinds of issues we discover are sometimes trivial, sometimes complex, sometimes bizarre.
It takes a very special kind of mindset to perform in a test role year after year, largely because we don't get the glamor of being the creator of the code that ships and our successes, a high quality product, often end up being credited to the developers. I often equate this to things I've heard about NASA and the United States space program. Apparently NASA has many times more engineers testing things than they do building things. For every astronaut up in orbit, there are thousands of folks on the ground ensuring everything is 'nominal'...and even then there are often problems anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I respect feature development, I did that for many many years and have shipped many successful products and line of business applications in many different industries. The creativity of being 'in flow' working on something new is very appealing to me. And Microsoft developers are truly the best of the best when it comes to producing world-class code. But development without testing and high quality bars generally produces sub-optimal products. And I've been quite fulfilled in this role as a test engineer, it comes naturally to me.
I've also made many new friends. The engineers I work alongside in test at my job are easily the most intelligent and gifted people I have ever had the opportunity to work with. And over the past few years we have worked very hard to produce an operating system worthy of praise.
I look back on the Windows 7 experience realizing the depth of the technical achievement, the humbling affect of the scale of the effort, of knowing my contribution is but a small fraction of much larger force, and a smile of knowing I'll always get to remember being a part of that effort.
I think you will be very pleased with Windows 7 when it hits store shelves less than 3 weeks from today. We've all worked very hard on it.
I'm proud of our accomplishment :).
-B
