Five Questions With Amol Kher

Amol Kher has been a tester at Microsoft for five years and change. While his feature teams appreciate his contributions to their work, testers across Microsoft appreciate his contributions to theirs: as one of the authors of a popular internal model-based testing tool, Amol is directly responsible for powering up their testing efforts. Amol has been powering up testers in a different way of late with his recent move into people leading, which he is discovering to be every bit as challenging as writing his model-based testing tool has ever been. He has a new challenge at home as well in the person of his infant son.

Here is what Amol 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?
AK: When I worked as a developer in a startup with very little test resources. I can't say I was a well-behaved developer, but I thought about the plight of a web application tester and the difficulties in robustness they had using third-party Web UI tools to automate testing.

DDJ: What has most surprised you as you have learned about testing/in your experiences with testing?
AK: It's never enough, also that people seem to think that because there is very little code, that there are not many bugs. Well what about missing code? Also how close testing is to representing your customers and being that first line of defense.

DDJ: What is the most interesting bug you have seen?
AK: I can't say I have rated any particular bug as the most interesting. Bugs that generally triggered QFE's have been quite interesting in general for me but more from the point of view about why did we/I miss it, what did the customer do that I didn't think about.

DDJ: How would you describe your testing philosophy?
AK: Think like the customer does and try out crazy things with your product. Use modeling to better understand and explore interactions between different components under test.

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?
AK: Time is always short, developers always want more features, customers don't always know how to use the features; how do you balance all of that by providing your feedback? Developers should do component level testing and leave the integration and scenario testing to test teams. Our developers should not just write code, they are responsible for writing high quality code, and they are the best people who could avoid bugs by writing unit tests.

DDJ: Is there something which is typically emphasized as important regarding testing that you think can be ignored, is unimportant?
AK: We depend too much on the number of bugs found and lines of code covered as the only metric of quality. I am generally more interested in data coverage and did you verify the method did what it was supposed to do.

DDJ: What do you see as the biggest challenge for testers/the test discipline for the next five years?
AK: Effectively representing your customer when software code is becoming so complex.

DDJ: Going meta (to channel Jerry Weinberg), what else should I ask you? What would you answer?
AK: Model-based testing- Why have I seen the light? I just recently found 2 bugs in product code that has been shipped for over 10 years by not even specifically looking for these bugs. Models can do that to you. Models are what developers will hate to love or love to hate.

DDJ: Is there anything else you would like to say?
AK: Enjoy reading your blog!

[See my Table Of Contents post for more details about this interview series.]

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink