December 29, 2008 - Book: How We Test Software at Microsoft

A really nice addition to my QA Bookshelf.

How We Test Software at Microsoft
by Alan Page, Ken Johnston, Bj Rollison

In How We Test Software at Microsoft, Alan Page, Ken Johnston, and Bj Rollison provide a terrific mix of insight into Microsoft, along with in-depth explanations of practical test processes.

From the introduction:

"This book is for anyone who is interested in the role of test at Microsoft or for those who want to know more about how Microsoft approaches testing.  This book isn't a replacement for any of the numerous other great texts on software testing.  Instead, it describes how Microsoft applies a number of testing techniques and methods of evaluation to improve our software."

I would also add that this book is for anyone who wants to learn some extremely useful, real-world approaches to both typical and complex testing situations.

Contents:

1. Software Engineering at Microsoft
2. Software Test Engineers at Microsoft
3. Engineering Life Cycles
4. A Practical Approach to Test Case Design
5. Functional Testing Techniques
6. Structural Testing Techniques
7. Analyzing Risk with Code Complexity
8. Model-Based Testing
9. Managing Bugs and Test Cases
10. Test Automation
11. Non-functional Testing
12. Other Tools
13. Customer Feedback Systems
14. Testing Software Plus Services
15. Solving Tomorrow's Problems Today
16. Building the Future

While not all of the solutions will apply to everyone (unless you happen to work at a company with over 9,000 testers), everyone will learn something.  The excellent explanations of Equivalence Class Partitioning and Boundary Value Analysis are among the best I have ever read.

This is a very good book - one I highly recommend to all current and would-be testers.

Have a Testing or QA-related book you particularly like?
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