About Alan

This is the stuff I share with conference folks who want to describe me in a few paragraphs to people who may want to hear what I have to say. While the below establishes credibility (or could…), what you really need to know about me is that I’m not afraid to ask tough questions or speak the truth (listen to the ABTesting podcast for plenty of examples). When speaking, I’m occasionally entertaining, but almost always provocative.
Alan has been improving software delivery since 1993 and is currently providing management overhead for a software team at a major media company. He spent six years at Unity Technologies doing similar work. Previous to joining Unity in 2017, Alan spent 22 years at Microsoft working on projects spanning the company – including a two-year position as Microsoft’s Director of Test Excellence.
Alan was the lead author of the book “How We Test Software at Microsoft”, contributed chapters for “Beautiful Testing”,  and “Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation”. His latest ebook (which may or may not see updates soon) is a collection of essays on test automation called “The A Word: Under the Covers of Test Automation” and is available on leanpub . For the latest information on Alan, listen to the AB Testing Podcast which he co-hosts with Brent Jensen.
And here’s the long version I use when I need to give people a lot more background of what and who I am.

I’m a native of the Pacific Northwest, moving from Spokane, WA to the Seattle area when I was 3 years old. I studied music in college, graduating with major degrees in Music Composition and Music Education. I taught music (high school Jazz, and middle school band) for 4 years before taking a year off to get a masters degree in Music Composition.

While working on my masters degree, I got pretty good at using a PC, and making it work with music programs (this was 1992, and I used a DOS based music notation program with all kinds of memory requirements). After graduate school, I worked as a bike messenger for about 6 months. The job was getting dangerous, so I applied for a dozen random jobs on Sunday morning, and ended up interviewing and getting a job at a company called Midisoft, where I was hired to do technical support for their music products. On my first day, they told me I was also their network administrator and software tester.

I worked at Midisoft for about 18 months, learning basic and C while I was there. When it was time for me to go (long story of ethics), I again, applied for a bunch of jobs, and was eventually hired in a contract position to help test networking on Windows 95. They apparently liked what I did, as I was hired as a full time employee six months later, in June, 1995.

I spent 22 years at Microsoft, and worked on a bunch of flavors of Windows and Windows CE, and Xbox One; a stupid science project to make Android apps run on Windows Phone,  Microsoft Teams, and a few other projects probably not worth listing. I spent 22 months (give or take) as Microsoft’s Director of Test Excellence – which was basically an internal role for developing and delivering technical training, and for building community across the company (something I continued to do long after I left that role). One other thing worth mentioning is that I was heavily involved in developing Microsoft’s “Career Guides” – something that I am either proud or ashamed of, depending on how they were used.

With zero reluctance, I left my bags of stock options behind in January 2017, and joined Unity Technologies, where I initially took a role running QA for their services teams, and eventually grew to a VP position where I led an org of ~250 people working on developer tools, web components, globalization, and documentation.

I have a blog (angryweasel.com), and a podcast (with Brent Jensen) at https://anchor.fm/abtesting. Something worth sharing out of that podcast are the Modern Testing Principles. We call these “Modern” as an opposition to “Traditional” test last / test quality in approaches, and are Engineering Principles rather than having much to do with testing.

I’ve written a book (How We Test Software at Microsoft), and e-book (The A Word), and contributed chapters to a few others, and I’ve given talks, workshops, and keynotes at software and software testing conferences around the world. I have a Tim Ferris inspired weekly “Five for Friday” post  (https://angryweasel.com/blog), as well as a weekly blog post (https://angryweasel.substack.com)

I’m a soccer fanatic, enjoy sous vide cooking, and I’m spending a lot of time recently with my dog, Terra.

Comments

  1. Question regarding HWTSAM related to unit testing. Is the SDE responsible for the unit test, or is it the SDET. If it is the SDE, when the SDET who receives unit tested code from the SDE, does he perform his own unit tests, or does he perform higher level integration testing or such?
    Thanks so much!

    Reply

    1. SDEs own unit testing – and usually some level of functional or component testing (and sometimes more).

      SDETs worry about large scenarios, and use data to analyze quality at a large scale.

      Reply

  2. Alan i think you need to update this page. “Currently a Principal Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) on the Xbox team, Alan spends his time designing and implementing test infrastructure and tests; and coaching and mentoring testers and test managers across the Xbox organization. Alan also leads company-wide quality and testing focused communities made up of senior engineering employees.” – seems little out of date 😛

    Reply
  3. Pingback: What is the advantage of choosing testing as compared to other career paths in Software Industry? | Full Software Development

  5. Hi Alan,

    I was trying to subscribe the RSS feed, however I think it is broken. Can you please have a look and let me know when can I proceed?

    Reply

  6. Hi Alan!

    My name is Tania, I am a Content Lead at aqua ALM – an AI-powered solution for QA management with focus on saving time for testers, developers and their managers. -> https://aqua-cloud.io/.

    I found one of your posts on MoT and I really enjoy reading your content about different QA and work insights. You do a great job by contributing to the community. I and other your subscribers learn many things from your posts and I value this very much.

    My team is launching two new products and I wanted to ask if you could try it out and post a review for your followers. I am sure that you know the needs of testers and developers like no one else and it would be an honor for us to have you as one of the first users.

    Here are the two products I am talking about:
    1. AI assistant which generates entire test case from a requirement
    2. A screen recording solution which saves information about the operating system, browser version, and window resolution used during the test (perfect tool to spend less time on answering questions from devs)

    Please let us know the details we should know about to cooperate with you. Or perhaps you are open to another format of collaboration?

    Please let me know if that sounds interesting or if you have any additional questions.

    I am looking forward to your reply!

    Best,
    Tania

    Reply

  8. Hi Alan

    I’ve been following your pod you do with Brent since seeing you live at the Ministry of Testing in Brighton a few years back.

    I’m a Test Lead at the UK’s national mapping agency Ordnance Survey. We have a great test community here and we meet regularly to share cool stuff with each other.

    Last year we had Dan Ashby join us to talk about the value of communities which went down really well and inspired us.

    Would you be open to join us for a session to talk about modern testing principles & share insights into your experiences? we are very open on topics, would be amaing if you could join us live to talk to us:)

    Cheers
    Leon

    Reply

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