Teams
I mentioned this at TestBash a few weeks ago (and on a yet-unreleased ABTesting podcast) – and probably on twitter too, but my third “secret” project in a row at Microsoft (following Xbox One and the science project to make Android apps run on Windows Phone) was finally announced to the world on November 2nd.
For the last fifteen months and change, I’ve been in charge of quality for Microsoft Teams. I was originally hired as “the quality guy”, where my job was to coach developers on testing, and ensure we had a strategy in place to deliver a quality product. Along the way, I picked up some infrastructure pieces and now am responsible for taking code from developer check-in all the way through do deployment. I’ve found that owning check-in gates, builds, and deployments (along with quality tools and testing) gives me a lot more confidence in releasing a high quality product to our customers.
It’s also been a great opportunity to catch up on a lot of tech and processes that I’ve wanted to get involved in. We use a lot of open source, and we try to release as frequently as we can (currently weekly, but certainly on the path to continuous deployment). There’s still a lot of work to do on the product, and a lot on my team to ensure we can improve builds, deployment, and quality.
Now that we’re “out there”, I can finally share some stories about things I’ve tried, what’s worked, and what has failed using real examples rather than abstract references. Looking forward to sharing those stories soon.