Stop Guessing about my STAR presentation

For anyone who recently attended STAR East and saw my presentation, thank you for attending, and for reading my blog. Some of you have viewed the slides on the proceedings CD and noticed that it’s not really like what I presented. I tend to change quite a bit of material between the date the slides are due and the actual presentation (In fact, I added a new slide about an hour before the conference).

Here are the slides I presented last week. Stop Guessing How Customers Use Your Software

And here is the video I showed about what happens with Windows error reports.

Similar Posts

  • Living Virtually

    I wrote about using virtual machines for testing in hwtsam, and gave a talk at STAR West a few years back on using virtual machines for testing. What I remember most about the talk was the group of VMWare employees sitting about 10 rows back (I think to ensure that I didn’t say anything bad…

  • To Combine… or not?

    I talk a lot (and write a bit) about software teams without separate disciplines for developers and testers (sometimes called “combined engineering” within the walls of MS – a term I find annoying and misleading – details below). For a lot of people, the concept of making software with a single team falls into the…

  • HWTSAM – One Year Later

    I think it’s been a year since How We Test Software at Microsoft made its way to store shelves (and amazon). For the first few months, I watched the amazon sales ranking multiple times a day. I took a screenshot last December 18th that shows one of the few times we hit the #1 testing…

  • Q&A about software testing

    If you want to skip the preamble and get to the point, just page down to the end of this post. The professional software testing community has a good support network of web sites dedicated (or partially dedicated) to answering questions about testing. Some of my favorites are: MSDN Testing Forums  SQA Forums Software Testing…

7 Comments

  1. Send me your snail mail address, and I’ll get a book sent to you. If you’re on twitter, you can DM me – otherwise, send an email to (alanpa at microsoft dot com)

  2. ROFL! Love the video. Thank you for sharing the final slides.

    I’ve been trying to bring in user data to testing for years. The variety of responses by team concern me to some extent. Many testers are glad to have any data, but question it. I have more respect for the testers who question it than those who just accept the data given to them as fact, but some testers don’t question it. They dismiss it! To them, why does it matter what customers are doing with what we already have since they are more interested in the future (features they now find boring). I’d try to point out that if we don’t learn what we can from the past and present we can’t make the future better. The amount of attention user data gets seems to depend more on the mindset of the test manager than that of individual testers.

    Great job of nailing the keynote. I heard multiple attendees saying this was the best Star conference ever.

  3. So glad you posted the video. I loved it at the conference and am sharing with my team today.

    Speaking in the afternoon when our brains are full is no mean feat and you did a great job Alan to keep us focused and entertained and to share some great information as well. Thanks!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.