Ken;

I have been working with software in one form or another for 40 years. One area of interest is Software Quality Assurance (SQA) and how it relates to software. It would seem that for Microsoft to have an SQA department familiar with a product such as VFP, VFP developers rather than SQA Engineers would have to be used.

Bugs or “anomalies” come in a number of flavors. We may call them by different names but the severity can be prioritized with something like:

1. Show stopper.
2. Inconvenient.
3. Intermittent (these are really difficult for everyone and rare).
4. Minor.

There is no one way companies treat testing and release of software as that is a business decision. Visual Studio 7.0 is an interesting case in point as Steve Ballmer announced the product would not ship until it was ready. I have seen many scenarios such as but not limited to:

1. A deliver date is defined and product released regardless of bug count and severity of bugs.

2. The company does no testing and allows customers to report bugs.

3. Bugs are defined and prioritized and all known sever bugs are resolved. A schedule is defined for those bugs that will be addressed. Not all bugs will be addressed in the life cycle of software.

When SQA can be applied to a software product many approaches can be used. An interesting methodology I observed was at Apple Computer at the Cupertino Campus, where a Cray computer is used to test all software for hardware/software compatibility. Apple has an advantage in that there is one hardware configuration unlike the PC.

Now for a question: Does Microsoft use a defined script used by testers for VFP during beta? That is are persons asked to test specific portions of the product?


Tom