In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.
This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.
I spent most of my time working on Visual Studio (in the Boston time frame) so we got to interact with pretty much every team. I absolutely hated interacting with the Windows team. Everything was a fight for no reason.
As I said above, everyone has their own experiences but the QA folks I worked with at MS were fantastic.
Not sure if you're aware but Dave Plumber now has a really good YT channel [0] where he talks about MS back in those days. It's a fun walk down memory lane.
Yes true, that is a possibility and something that's quite hard to police remotely. It doesn't feel likely, everyone's working kind of the same, booking the same hours and overtime is no different, but I can't rule it out.
It'd mean that hundreds of people would all be goofing off silently. I'd expect at least overtime bookings to decrease and they haven't - even with our strong incentives to not book o/t.
I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that there’s some kind of fundamental “randomness” (as in one that isn’t a measure of ignorance) in the world. Claiming its existence sounds like claiming to know what we don’t know.
Why make it work with a mobile app at all? How is that even a convenience? This is an appliance you need to be physically present at to load and unload.
No disagreement there, but once you are set on a mobile app, you are going to push for it to be used.
It all probably starts benign: let's push some notifications to customer's phones (already requires a server — ahem, a cloud — and a mobile app).
Then smart product managers realize that the app is not used by anyone, and they start thinking about "value add" with the app, and quickly, you are looking at removing things from the physical unit and putting them only in software.
A PM next: look, this release has increased usage of the app 10x!
Instead of them just doing the right thing and nixing the app — but who'd advocate for cutting their own job?
I could see a remote notification that it finished being useful. That said, the manufacturers would never go for this, but a dry contact for a GPO that is asserted on the machine finishing is likely all a number of people here would ever need/want.
This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.
reply