Alan Page, Ken Johnston and Bj Rollison

Publisher	Microsoft Press
ISBN	9-780-73562-425-2
RRP	£35.49
Reviewed by	Kawal Banga
Score	10 out of 10

 This book is written by three very senior testing people at Microsoft - the current Director of Test Excellence, a former Director of Test Excellence and a Test Architect.

The book is clearly aimed at explaining the test practices and strategic approach to testing at Microsoft. However, the approach and practices are equally applicable at other organisations. This book is suitable reading for all levels of testing staff from the tester right up to the director responsible for testing, as well as other IT staff who are interested in improving their own organisation's approach to testing software.

Microsoft is a large organisation, employing a total of 80,000 staff (1998 figures) with product engineering staff working across 40 locations around the world. As a consequence, the authors state that the book does not cover every approach to testing across Microsoft, but does cover the most popular tools, techniques and processes.

The book is divided into fours parts:

• Part I looks at software engineering practices and lifecycles at Microsoft and the recruitment and training of software testers at Microsoft.
• Part II covers testing techniques.
• Part III covers test tools and systems.
• Part IV looks at the future of testing. 

I found Part I the most interesting. Here are some interesting snippets:

• Microsoft calls its testers software development engineers in test (SDET).
• Microsoft has one tester for every developer.
• Microsoft has over 9,000 testers out of a total product-engineering workforce of 35,000.
• Microsoft hires more than a 1,000 testers every year. [I would be interested in seeing the recruitment trends over the last few years.]
• The vast majority of testers at Microsoft are actually developers who specialise in testing. Some are subject mater experts (SMEs). Why this is so is explained in the book.

It is not surprising that Microsoft testers are typically skilled developers, as the testing of Microsoft products is a huge undertaking, and automated scripts are written and used where possible. More than a million test cases were written for Microsoft Office 2007 and the automated tests for many Microsoft products have more lines of code than the products they test. 

Portions of the book are based on a 24-hour training course 'Testing at Microsoft for SDETs', so it is a fairly practical book. Although there are other books that provide more comprehensive coverage of techniques, this book does cover functional and structural testing techniques, code/cyclomatic complexity, model based testing, managing bugs and test cases, automation, and non-functional testing.

Customer driven testing, SOA testing, tomorrow's testing problems and common issues and problems and their solutions at Microsoft are also covered. 

All in all, this is an excellent book, and should be on every tester's bookshelf.

Further information: Microsoft Press

April 2009