Work Experience

I am a software engineer, tester, test leader. Most of my career has been at Microsoft. I started as a phone support engineer, helping customers with Microsoft Word. I worked on the original MSN 1.0 team as a tester, starting in April, 1994. After two and a half releases of MSN, I worked on both Microsoft Commercial Internet Services, and Microsoft Site Server.

Toward the end of the 1990s I was one of the original founding members of the Microsoft Sharepoint team, and stayed with that as a test lead, test manager, tester, software design engineer through multiple iterations until 2012. At that point I moved to the Office Engineering team, which builds the tools, services, and systems used to ship Microsoft Office. In 2014 became a software engineer as part of Microsoft’s overall movement to align development and testing into a single job role.

Across my career I have worked on GUI applications, client-server software, enterprise servers, proprietary online services, and large-scale cloud hosted software. I have spent years working with, design, and utilizing automation systems. I enjoy pushing boundaries of innovation with software testing, and automation.

Books

Many of the testers working for me had trouble writing test plans. Most of them were either suffering from writers block, or were struggling with how to represent their testing ideas. I found a simple, fast, outline based format helped my testers get ideas on paper quickly that were easy to understand and review. I share that approach in this book.

Conferences and Presentations

Flaky Test Automation

This is a presentation I gave describing how the Office team at Microsoft not just manages, but utilizes flaky test results to their advantage. I describe the important difference between using automation to gate code submissions versus using automation to find bugs, and how flaky test automation is an important signal in both those activities.

Using Product Signal Information In Testing

This is a presentation where I describe how we integrated product telemetry signals with the automation systems in Office, and different ways of using that information to infer information about product quality as well as assess the performance and quality of your automation suite. This talk represents a key cornerstone priniple I used for later research applying AI to product testing practices.