This talk is the tale of four software professionals who set out to produce guidance for testers around the world. This team, headquartered at Microsoft’s Redmond campus in the Patterns & Practices division, focused on the topic of “acceptance testing.” They set out to collaborate not only with each other, but also with other internal teams. That quickly expanded to testers outside of Microsoft, and borrowing ideas from other domains like aerospace and biomedical to form rich notions of what acceptance testing might mean, no matter the context.
This paper explains the ways we collaborated and strived to ensure that the artifacts we were producing were relevant and meaningful to our target – in effect, “eating our own dog food.” Furthermore, it explains our research about the notion of acceptance testing, which we found comes in two phases: readiness (preparing for the acceptance) and the customer actually performing the acceptance tests.
Jon Bach is Corporate Intellect Manager and senior consultant for Quardev Laboratories (www.quardev.com) – a Seattle test lab specializing in rapid, exploratory testing. He has been a presenter at PNSQC for the last 5 years.
Grigori Melnik, Michael Puleio, and Rohit Sharma are employed by Microsoft Patterns & Practices group.
