First published on TECHNET on Jan 21, 2009
Hi, first let me introduce myself. My name is Kathy Tamanaha and I work on the System Center Service Manager QA (aka Test) Team as a Software Test Lead. I have spent the last 15 years at Microsoft as a Software Tester, working on various product teams and I moved over to the Service Manager team about a year ago.
This post is a first in a behind the scenes look on "How We Test Service Manager". While the entire team is busy working to design/develop/test the product, I hope to give you an opportunity to see what the QA team is doing by explaining how the team is organized, what type of processes/tools we use, and which Software Development Model we use to develop Service Manager. You will even get a look at a "Day in the Life of a Service Manager Tester" in a future post.
If you read Ketan Ghelani's
post
in which he describes the architecture of Service Manager, you can see
that the product is composed of different horizontal layers as well as distinct components in each layer. The Service Manager QA Team is organized in much the same way as the product is architected. While I cannot disclose how many people we have working on the product, we have approximately the same number of testers as we have developers (the folks who write the code and build the features) on the product team. This means that for every developer, there is roughly 1 tester who tests the developer's code once it is written and ready to be verified by the test team. It's not an absolute 1-1 mapping but the ratio is a pretty common one seen in many other Microsoft Product teams.
Referring back to the
architecture of Service Manager
, each tester is responsible for at least one 'feature' in the product. A feature can be for instance, Incident Management or the Configuration Manager Connector. At a higher level organizational view, there are teams dedicated to testing:
· the Solutions Layer
· the Infrastructure Layer
· the Solution Integration (aka Connectors) Components
· the Data Warehouse Components and Reports
as well as a team dedicated just for Performance and Stress testing!
In my next post, I will talk about the Software Development model that we use to develop Service Manager. In the meantime, if you would like to see something specific written regarding "How We Test Service Manager", please feel free to make comments to this post or send in suggestions to me via email. I would like to see this series used as a way to help make this product better and any suggestions you may have regarding testing processes or customer data as it relates to test, will be greatly encouraged and appreciated :)
Till next time....
