When I meet new people, they often ask, \u201cwhat do you do?\u201d The answer I give initially, and the one I hope to get away with is, \u201cI work at Microsoft.\u201d<\/p>\n
It rarely works. They inevitably follow up with, \u201cwhat do you do there?\u201d \u2013 which, for better or for worse is a much more difficult question to answer. Depending on their technical knowledge (and my mood), I\u2019ll say something between \u201cI work on a team that does technical training, internal consulting and cross-company projects for engineers\u201d, \u201cI\u2019m the Director of Test Excellence, and \u201cI stop people from being stupid\u201d. It was much a much easier question to answer when I worked on a product team, but I like the job, so I\u2019ll deal with the moments of awkwardness.<\/p>\n
I thought I\u2019d write down a longer answer for those who are curious (or want to help me with a better definition).<\/p>\n
The biggest thing I\u2019m working on this year is helping engineers across the company have a common concept of software quality. This includes working with marketing on customer perception of quality and a lot of talking with people from around the company to see which practices are common, and discover some practices that should be shared more widely. It\u2019s a hard problem to solve (and there are a lot more pieces to it), but it\u2019s a fun challenge.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m also working on a variety of small projects to increase collaboration among testers and other engineers at the company. With nearly 10,000 testers, there\u2019s not nearly enough sharing of ideas, practices or innovation among people solving problems that are likely much more similar than people realize. Every time I see a duplication of effort or the same question asked on a distribution list for the 3rd time in a month I\u2019m reminded of how much more work there is to do in this area.<\/p>\n
Edit: I forgot a big chunk worth adding<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n A reasonably sized chunk of our organization’s work is technical training for engineers at Microsoft. My team teaches some classes, but I work with vendors to teach and design a fair number of test related courses world-wide. I also own scheduling and prioritization\u00a0of technical\u00a0courses for what we call MSUS (shorthand for\u00a0all<\/span> MS engineers in the US outside of Redmond). It sort of a thankless job, but needs to be done and I don’t mind doing it.<\/p>\n The bulk of the rest of the time goes to what I call – \u201cbeing Alan\u201d. I organize and schedule meetings for our company-wide test leadership team and test architect group, and chair our quality and test experts community. I also function as chief-of-staff for my boss\u2019s staff meetings (he attends the meeting alternate weeks, and I take care of the agenda and flow of the meetings every week). I participate in a few virtual teams \/ micro-communities (e.g. cross-company test code quality initiatives or symposiums on testability). I\u2019m on the board for sasqag<\/a>, and put in a few hours a month keeping things alive on the msdn tester center<\/a>. I give talks to internal teams a few times a month and mentor half-a-dozen testers in various roles around the company. Finally (and most importantly), I manage a team of 6 people who work on similar projects, as well as teach testing courses. It helps a lot that the team is so smart and so motivated, because I\u2019m most likely not the best manager in the world.<\/p>\n