How We Test Software at Microsoft®

Introduction

I still remember the morning, sometime late in the fall of 2007, when my manager at the time, Ken Johnston, uttered these five words, “You should write a book.”

He had just come back from delivering a talk at an industry test conference (not coincidentally titled, “How We Test Software at Microsoft,”) and was excited by the audience reception. Ken loves to give presentations, but he somehow thought I should be the one to write the book.

I humored him and said, “Sure, why not.” I went on to say that the book could cover a lot of the things that we teach in our software testing courses, as well as a smattering of other popular test approaches used at Microsoft. It could be interesting, but there are a ton of books on testing—I know, I’ve ...