Rogerio P. Santos said
I would recommend this book not only for testers, but anyone involved somehow on development process.
For managers, would help them to realize their own mistakes and compromises towards a decent final product and for developers, their own piece of guilty on the Q&A process.
It is not a "Microsoft book" sharing only "appraisals" to Microsoft itself, but good on identifying several parts of the Q&A process.
A good start if you want to stop creating "software on demand", like a fast foode counter order.
Joseph S. Strazzere said
In "How We Test Software at Microsoft", Alan Page, Ken Johnston, and Bj Rollison provide a terrific mix of insight into Microsoft, along with in-depth explanations of practical test processes.
From the introduction:
"This book is for anyone who is interested in the role of test at Microsoft or for those who want to know more about how Microsoft approaches testing. This book isn't a replacement for any of the numerous other great texts on software testing. Instead, it describes how Microsoft applies a number of testing techniques and methods of evaluation to improve our software."
I would also add that this book is for anyone who wants to learn some extremely useful, real-world approaches to both typical and complex testing situations.
This is a very good book - one I highly recommend to all current and would-be testers.
Vamsi Nellutla said
This book is one of my favorities on Software Testing. I would recommend this book to every one who wants get a fresh perspective on software testing/SQA. My best pick from the book is the chapter on "A practical approach to Test Case design", Authors have tremendously succeeded in explaining the principles with great real life examples in a very lucid style. Personally, it helped to improvize the test planning efforts at my work place and also to explain & emphasize the need for desigining "practical" test scenarios to my students. Chapter on "Test Automation" provides very good insights on how to take best advantage of automation tools. Book is neatly organized and will be a great reading for beginners and for experienced QA professionals as well.
Hima said
I was disappointed by this book. The bottom line is that this book has nothing in it which isn't covered better by other software testing books. And the information which is specific to Microsoft is not useful to anyone who is not a Microsoft employee. As another reviewer correctly pointed out, this book does not contain detailed information about specific software testing techniques. That's OK. The book does give all the pertinent acronyms and buzzwords, but paradoxically goes into too much detail, which obscures the important principles. In short, if you want a book which explains software testing techniques used at Microsoft, this is not the book for you. If you want a book which explains testing principles, you are better off with Kaner's "Testing Computer Software" or Patton's "Software Testing". This book might be useful for senior level software testing managers at Microsoft who are looking for a light story-based approach. I suspect there is a good reason why this book was published by Microsoft Press rather than by an impartial publishing company.
Pros: Generally well written and maybe an enjoyable read for experienced Microsoft managers.
Cons: Not technique based as the title might suggest, and not nearly as good as existing books for software testing principles.
C. Madden said
Spoiler Alert: Software is tested at Microsoft with mind-numbing bureaucracy and buzzwords.
I understand this is a "how we do testing a Microsoft" book, but I at least expected a few real code samples, unit tests, test automation scripts, or test plan samples. Instead, code samples were obviously simple functions thrown together by the author, and in-depth testing samples are nowhere to be found.
Instead, this book mostly comes off as an HR manual. MS's testing career path is documented in agonizing detail, and the author tries too hard to suck up to his bosses. Seriously, he actually tells the reader to search for Steve Balmer speeches on Live.com to become inspired.
Once they actually start talking about testing, it is incredibly vague and buzzword laden. There are a few good pieces of advice here, but nothing you won't find in a far better book.
The key question of how software is tested at MS is never really answered. For example:
1. Linux maintainers use Coverity on the Linux Kernel. Does MS use such tools on their Kernel?
2. What sort of scripting languages are used for automation testing of Office or Windows or any other MS product?
3. What sort of Unit Testing software do MS developers use? CppUnit? NUnit? The Unit testing feature in VS2008? What do some of these unit tests look like?
4. What does the typical test plan at MS look like?
5. What sort of white-box testing do developers perform? There are a few vague references to unit testing, but what about performance and coverage testing? What specific tools do they use? What do their result reports look like?
After reading this book, I'm hard pressed to answer any of these.
I would strongly advise people new to testing to avoid this book; otherwise they will be discouraged. Testing can actually be fun and interesting--this book is not.
P.S., I notice the high reviews of this book are from Microsoft employees. Conflict of interest, anyone?
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