Greetings from HYD

I’m in Hyderabad, India this week to meet with some of our team and to give a handful of presentations at an internal conference. The weather is wonderful this week – it’s warm during the day and cool at night. I got to the hotel around 2:00am Tuesday morning, but got a few hours of sleep before heading into work. I was pretty loopy by the end of the day yesterday, but feel pretty good today (so far).

It’s been a few years since I was last in India, and I forgot how much I enjoy Indian food. Most of my colleagues seem to be sticking with the "safe" American style food available in the hotel, but I don’t think they don’t know what they’re missing.

Speaking of colleagues, while exchanging some email with my manager (who is also here), I realized something significant about this trip. Ross (my manager) mentioned that we (there are five of us from the Lync team here) were meeting for breakfast (at some time I don’t remember), then heading over to MS afterwards. It hit me then that this is the first time since 2003 or so that I’ve taken a business trip non-solo. Due to the nature of my role in my last group along with my occasional conference appearance, I haven’t traveled with other people in a long, long time – and I bet I’ve taken at least 30-40 trips in the last 6 years alone. To be fair, it’s not difficult having others on the trip, in fact in some ways it’s easier (someone else, for example, figures out where to eat and what time we need to be someplace). It’s just sort of a new experience for me.

Each of the major MS subsidiaries (including the main campus in Redmond) has a yearly "engineering forum" – which is basically a mini-software conference. Because I happen to be in Hyderabad to meet with some of the Lync test team, I was also hooked into giving several presentations. Thinking back, the forum team here did a pretty good job taking advantage of my presence. At first they asked for one talk, so I gave them some sample topics I could talk about. In that conversation, they asked if I could give two talks. I said sure. A few days later, they asked me for abstracts for my three talks – and that’s where we stand today (if you don’t count the panel discussion I’m involved with on Friday).

My talks are all on Thursday – I’ll start off with a talk about Tester DNA – i.e. what makes some testers great. This was a talk I was going to give in Redmond a month or so ago, but ended up cancelling due to some scheduling problems. My second talk – immediately after is on customer focused test design – something I’ve been digging pretty deeply into lately. I previewed a snippet of it into a meeting yesterday and it seemed to be well received, so we’ll see what a larger scale reveals. I get an hour break after the test design talk, then I’ll talk about testing in production. I’ve been a long time fan of testing in production (TiP) ever since Ken Johnston started developing and communicating his ideas on the subject while writing chapter 14 of hwtsam. Ken, along with people like Seth Eliot, Keith Stobie, Felix Deschamps and many others at Microsoft are mega-experts in the subject, while I’m just sort of a big fan of the concept. I’m a big enough fan, however, that I’m confident I can pull off a nice 101 level talk about TiP and I’m looking forward to this talk a lot. And – since it’s the 3rd of 3 talks on Thursday, I’m looking forward to completing the talk as well.

Friday, as I mentioned, I’m taking part in a panel discussion in the afternoon. I hope to meet with more of the test team today and Friday as well – we’re also trying to organize a test team cricket match Friday, and I hope we can get that set up.

And then, just when I’m settled in, it will be time to head home. I’ll fly back to Seattle late Saturday night.