It’s been a long time since I wrote a post that wasn’t a Five for Friday, but this may be my last chance to write a decade-end post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ten years ago, at the beginning of the decade, I was wrapping up a tour of duty in Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence<\/a> group where I was a Director in charge of trying to educate and unite Microsoft’s army of nearly 10,000 testers (spoiler – they’re all gone now).<\/p>\n\n\n\n How We Test Software at Microsoft was just two years old, and still sort of relevant. I think that Microsoft recruiting bought more copies of that book than anyone else – they used to mail it to nearly all of the SDET candidates we were bringing in from Universities. That was probably the biggest impact the book had on the industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early in 2010, I joined Lync<\/a> (which was then called, Office Communicator, and then later changed to Skype for Business). There were a lot of great people on that team, but when the opportunity came up to join the team building (what became) Xbox One, I jumped on it. That job was probably the last time I wrote code as the majority of my job, and afaik, a lot of the tools and console code I wrote are still being used today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2010, I also gave a keynote where I talked entirely about collecting customer data to understand how customers are using your software. While not even new back then, that topic is borderline boring today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Xbox, I followed my manager and worked briefly on a science project to make Android apps work on Windows Phone. It worked really well, but I knew from day 1 that it would never ship (I was sort of wrong, because the linux system on Windows came from that effort). I used the role as a Kata for learning Java, Linux, and Powershell (only the latter two were useful long-term). It was during this role that I took a month off to travel in Australia, and then two more months to hang out in the south of France.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Somewhere in the middle of my time on Xbox, Brent Jensen and I began our podcast<\/a> together, and eventually sort of made a thing of the Modern Testing Principles<\/a> (which, as we often say, aren’t very modern, and have nothing to do with Testing)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I had to get back to work, so I worked on Microsoft Teams for the remainder of my Microsoft Career. That story<\/a> (as well as the rest of these) are well documented in this blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n