Five Questions With Anu Arora

Anu Arora works in the Engineering Excellence group at Microsoft. Her interview contains pretty much everything I would typically write here, so rather than saying it twice I will hand you directly over to her. Here is what Anu 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?
AA: The very first job I had as a aerospace engineer to work as a systems engineer in manufacturing helicopters. As a part of this job, I was involved in the ground testing of helicopters components and systems. I quickly realized that there was nothing more critical then the testing function in this industry. I also realized that I had an aptitude for it and enjoyed doing it.

My fascination for testing remained strong. Years later when an opportunity came through to make it as a career at Microsoft, I took it on.

DDJ: What has most surprised you as you have learned about testing/in your experiences with testing?
AA: The misuse of metrics! Whether it is code coverage, bug metrics, test coverage metrics, there is a lack of common understanding at what they really mean. In my career in software testing, it is interesting to see that sometimes people not only misinterpret metrics on their narrow understanding and then are adamant about their conclusions. I would like to remind folks that even the very well defined metrics are tools that provide us with data to help us make decisions. Metrics can’t replace commonsense and intuition in decision making, which comes with skills, knowledge and experience.

The other surprise was the constant struggle for testing to get their well deserved status. Today, when everything depends on software – mission critical, business critical and even life critical, you would assume that this discipline gets its due. However, it is undermined a lot in the industry. I think to some extent we are our worst enemies. We have compromised on the quality of testers we hire. We need to have testers who are qualified and passionate about the field and make the profession lucrative enough to retain people who are experienced.

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?
AA: Testers need to understand that testing is not just a lot of automation. Testers also need to understand that it is not the other extreme – banging the keyboard.

Testing is a highly skilled and sophisticated discipline and testers are the last line of defense for the customer. For the same reasons, the testers need to continually learn and grow; learn new ways to test, learn about the customer and market, learn to be always on the cutting edge of testing.

Developers need to understand that testers are not babysitters. Developers need to be responsible for their own code. Developers need to ensure what they write, works. In the testing language it is called unit testing. As a Test manager, I have been asked once in a while by the few ignorant ones; that if developers did all that, what will testers do? Testers can them move beyond unit testing to focus on integration, systems, scenario and user testing. These are absolutely critical from the customer point of view – the one whom we are building this product for.

DDJ: What do you see as the biggest challenge for testers/the test discipline for the next five years?
AA: I can see quite a few. The obvious ones are:

• Hiring qualified testers. This becomes difficult as most colleges don’t offer software testing in their CS curriculum.


• Retaining experienced people: Development and Program Manager are still the more glamorous careers to seek in the IT industry.

Not so obvious ones are:

• The shift from the typical product life cycles like Waterfall, V-shaped, etc. to Extreme Programming (XP) means a paradigm shift in testing from bug detection to bug prevention.


• The science of testing needs to continue to advance at a fast pace. With products getting more complex, customers demanding higher quality, and market demanding shorter time to ship, the testers will need the new ways of testing, methodologies, tools and process to aid them. There is a pressure on our fairly young discipline to become mature quickly.

DDJ: Is there anything else you would like to say?
AA: I have been in software test for nine years now. It was my passion for testing which brought me here and it is the variety, the breadth of experience which this discipline has given me which continues to excite and motivate me.

Are there challenges in testing today?

You betcha!

There are more myths about testing than anything else.

• That you can’t test-in quality.


• That high code coverage means high quality.


• That testing is there to just cause us delay to ship.


• Black box testing or white box testing is sufficient.

I enjoy educating people and breaking these myths. As a part of a small team of core instructors in testing for the entire company (in the engineering excellence team), I am responsible for the training and development of test leads and managers at Microsoft. I ensure that they have the learning resources and training to ship great products. I am also an instructor for the SDET (Software Design Engineer in Test) curriculum. It is both an honor and a huge responsibility. And, there is nothing else which I have enjoyed more in my career. My goal is that Microsoft continues to have world class testers who are prepared for the next set of challenges and have a huge role to play in shipping great (high quality) products.

DDJ: Going meta (to channel Jerry Weinberg), what else should I ask you? What would you answer?
AA: What was the most defining moment in your testing career and why?

It was the space shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003. I was driving my kids for one of their weekend activities and I heard on the radio that my friend and fellow aerospace engineer from Punjab Engineering College, Kalpana Chawla, was killed along with the rest of the crew. As months went by, the shock settled in. I realized that it had impacted me in a big way. I started looking at my job as more then – I am a mere tester, my job is to just show the mirror. I became a quality advocate. I understood that mistakes and compromises can be very costly. I encouraged my test teams to bring evidence so that critical bugs can be fixed and never lost because we didn’t understand their magnitude. That meant more work for us, but it was worth it.

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink