Five Questions With James Rodrigues

Fifteen years at Microsoft hasn't softened James Rodrigues' Massachusetts accent any. Back then he was a Software Development Engineer in Test, which in Microsoft parlance means "a tester who could be a developer if they wished". Eventually he lost his way and moved into management. <g/> He's redeeming himself, however, in his current position as Microsoft's Director of Test Excellence. A high-level executive charged with making testing better - that seems pretty cool to me!

Here is what James has to say:

DDJ: How would you describe your testing philosophy?
JR: I have a “whatever it takes” sort of mentality. I encourage everyone to feel responsible for all aspects of the product and find ways to fill the gaps rather than complain about the other discipline. Have your complaints lead to actions you can take to improve the situation. It’s an action/results oriented philosophy.

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?
JR: I’d like everyone to answer these two questions as part of their requirements and design:
    - What’s the compelling customer scenario this enables?
    - How are we going to test it?

DDJ: Is there something which is typically emphasized as important regarding testing that you think can be ignored, is unimportant?
JR: Too often I see an emphasis on the quantity of bugs a test team finds in terms of keeping the development team busy fixing them. I would rather see teams learn more from their bugs by doing a causal analysis and try to improve their engineering systems to prevent the class of bugs in the future. In other words, learn from our mistakes at a team not just an individual level.

DDJ: What do you see as the biggest challenge for testers/the test discipline for the next five years?
JR: As our software products become more complex I think we’ll begin to see more and more test specialization roles emerge like security expert or network protocol expert and the challenge will be to create a community to allow knowledge transfer so we can accelerate learning curves and mitigate risks in places where you wish you had an expert but instead have staffed the position with a smart but inexperienced person. The needs won’t be limited to technology but will also include domain expertise in fields such as healthcare, taxation, financials, or globalization. It is too much for one person to know everything and the costs of a mistake can be very high.

DDJ: Is there anything else you would like to say?
JR: I have a lot of respect for developers and other roles that are so critical to creating great software. That being said, I really love the testing discipline. Though very technical, it also allows me to tap into a creative side that really appeals to me. I think about the customer and am opinionated about what features should do and how they should integrate to make a compelling user experience. I enjoy the technologies and figuring out how to architect testability into our products. I get to write a lot of code focused on validating the product using the testability we designed into it. Finally, I get a bit of an ego rush in finding a bug. It’s something I try to keep respectful around the developers but when it’s just the test folks in the room I’ll let out my celebratory victory yell.

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink