Five Questions With S. Somasegar

S. Somasegar runs the Developer Division at Microsoft. That means he's my boss. (If you ignore the three levels of management in between....) It also means he's ultimately responsible for everything you love and hate about Microsoft's Visual Studio and Expression tools. Evidently that still leaves him some free time, because Microsoft's India Development Center in Hyderabad is under his wing as well. And his eponymous blog is proving to be the most reliable (i.e., he's actually still posting on a regular basis!) Microsoft Big Wig blog around.

One of the things I like best about Soma is that he used to be a tester. Here's what Soma has to say:

DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing? What did that leave you thinking about the act and/or concept of testing?
Soma: My first introduction to testing was when I joined the OS/2 team as a Software Design Engineer in Test owning some of the kernel components of the operating system. There were two main reasons why I was excited about testing software – 1) I knew that part of a tester’s job was to represent the customer, understand what the customer would want to do with the product and then apply that knowledge and intuition to testing to ensure that the product lived up to the customer’s expectations on functionality and quality 2) The act of debugging a software problem is exhilarating and literally addictive.

DDJ: What has most surprised you as you have learned about testing/in your experiences with testing?
Soma: Testing is quite fun and challenging if you are interested in trying to break things apart, have fun in debugging things and problem solving. You get to learn the breadth of the system (software) and understand how software components work together to enable scenarios. From a functional management perspective, test management is probably the most complicated one.

DDJ: How would you describe your testing philosophy?
Soma: The tester has a unique responsibility to put himself/herself in the customer shoes and ensure that the product is customer ready by the time we ship – the scenarios stick together, the quality, performance and usability are up to standard and that the customer has a great experience when they use the product.

DDJ: What do you think is the most important thing for a tester to know? To do? For developers to know and do about testing?
Soma: The most important thing for a tester to know is that they are the 1st customer for the software that is being developed and they absolutely represent the customer view when it comes to testing and quality. They have to be involved hand in hand with the developer as the software is being developed and not as an after-thought. Developers need to keep in mind software testing right from the beginning and ensuring that testability hooks are built in. Developers are as much responsible for the quality of the software and the experience as testers are.

DDJ: What do you see as the biggest challenge for testers/the test discipline for the next five years?
Soma: Software development continues to be constrained by testing, at least at Microsoft. We often talk about the biggest constraint to delivering software is our test bandwidth. This really means that we need to do a much better job of involving test right from the design phase, ensure that we apply the right resources, bandwidth and IQ to truly make breakthrough progress in terms of tools related to test automation, test prioritization, code coverage and the like. We should also think about what the roles and responsibilities are for a developer in terms of ensuring quality. There are teams at Microsoft now that are experimenting with different models where an engineering team is responsible both for development and testing and not really differentiating between a tester role and a developer role. It will be interesting to see which of these models evolve as we take software engineering (development and test) to the next level.

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink