This interview with Alan Page is part of our series of “Testing Smarter with…” interviews. Our goal with these interviews is to highlight insights and experiences as told by many of the software testing field’s leading thinkers.

Alan Page has been a software tester (among other roles) since 1993 and is currently the Director of Quality for Services at Unity. Alan spent over twenty years at Microsoft working on a variety of operating systems and applications in nearly every Microsoft division.

Alan Page Alan Page

Personal Background

Hexawise: Looking back on over 20 years in software testing at Microsoft can you describe a testing experience you are especially proud of?

Alan: There are a lot of great experiences to choose from - but I'm probably most proud of my experiences on the Xbox One team. My role was as much about building a community of testers across the the Xbox ecosystem (console, services, game development) as it was about testing and test strategy for the console. We had a great team of testers, including a handful of us with a lot of testing experience under our belts. We worked really well together, leveraged each others strengths, and delivered a product that has had nearly zero quality issues since the day of release.

Hexawise: What did you enjoy about working in such a large software company, Microsoft, for so long?

Alan: The only way I survived at Microsoft so long was that I could change jobs within the company and get new experiences and challenges whenever I felt I needed them. I love to take on new challenges and find things that are hard to do - and I always had that opportunity.

The biggest thing I look for in testers is a passion and ability to learn. I've interviewed hundreds of testers... The testers who really impress me are those who love to learn - not just about testing, but about many different things. Critical thinking and problem solving are also quite important.

Hexawise: What new challenges are you looking forward to tackling in your new role at Unity?

Alan: I'm looking forward to any and all challenges I can find. Specifically, I want to build a services testing community at Unity. Building community is something I feel really strongly about, and from what I've seen so far, I think there are a lot of opportunities for Unity testers to learn a lot from each other while we play our part in the coming growth of Unity services.

Views on Software Testing

Hexawise: What thoughts do you have in involving testers in A/B and multivariate testing? That stretches the bounds of how many people categorize testers but it could be a good use of the skills and knowledge some testers process.

Alan: My approach to experimentation (A/B testing) is that there are three roles needed. Someone needs to design the experiment. A product owner / program manager often plays this role and will attempt to figure out the variation (or variations) for the experiment as well as how to measure the business or customer value of both the control (original implementation) and treatment / experiment.

The second role is the implementer - this is typically a developer or designer depending on the nature of the experiment. Implementing an experiment is really no different than implementing any other product functionality.

The final role is the analyst role - someone needs to look at the data from the experiment, as well as related data and attempt to prove whether the experiment is a success (i.e. the new idea / treatment is an improvement) or not. I've seen a lot of testers be successful in this third role, and statistics and data science in general, are great skills for testers to learn as they expand their skill set.

Hexawise: During your 20 years at Microsoft you have been involved in hiring many software testers. What do you look for when choosing software testers? What suggestions do you have for those looking to advance in their in software testing career?

Alan: The biggest thing I look for in testers is a passion and ability to learn. I've interviewed hundreds of testers, including many who came from top universities with advanced degrees who just weren't excited about learning. For them, maybe learning was a means to an end, but not something they were passionate about.

The testers who really impress me are those who love to learn - not just about testing, but about many different things. Critical thinking and problem solving are also quite important.

As far as suggestions go, keep building your tool box. As long as you're willing to try new things, you'll always be able to find challenging, fun work. As soon as you think you know it all, you will be stuck in your career.

Combinatorial testing is actually pretty useful in game testing. For example, consider a role-playing game with six races, ten character classes, four different factions, plus a choice for gender. That's 480 unique combinations to test! Fortunately, this has been proven to be an area where isolating pairs (or triples) of variations makes testing possible, while still finding critical bugs.

Hexawise: Do you have a favorite example of a combinatorial bug and how it illuminated a challenge with software testing?

Alan: I was only indirectly involved in discovering this one, but the ridiculously complex font-picker dialog from the Office apps was a mess to test - but it was tested extensively (at least according the person in charge of testing it). A colleague of mine showed them the all pairs technique, and they used it to massively decrease their test suite - and found a few bugs that had existed for years.

Hexawise: It seems to me that testing games would have significant challenges not found in testing fairly straightforward business applications. Could you share some strategies for coping with those challenges?

Alan: Combinatorial testing is actually pretty useful in game testing. For example, consider a role-playing game with six races, ten character classes, four different factions, plus a choice for gender. That's 480 unique combinations to test! Fortunately, this has been proven to be an area where isolating pairs (or triples) of variations makes testing possible, while still finding critical bugs.

Beyond that, testing games requires a lot of human eyeballs and critical thinking to ensure gameplay makes sense, objects are in the right places, etc. I've never seen a case where automating gameplay, for example, has been successful. I have, however, seen some really innovative tools written by testers to help make game testing much easier, and much more effective.

Hexawise: That sounds fascinating, could you describe one or more of those tools?

Alan: The games test organization at Microsoft wrote a few pretty remarkable tools. One linked the bug tracking system to a "teleportation" system in the game under test, including a protocol to communicate between a windows PC and an xbox console.

This enabled a cool two-way system, where a tester could log a bug directly from the game, and the world coordinates of where the bug occurred were stored automatically in the bug report. Then, during triage or debugging, a developer / designer could click on a link in the bug report, and automatically transport to the exact place on the map where the issue was occurring.

Hexawise: What type of efforts to automate gameplay came close to providing useful feedback? What makes automating gameplay for testing purposes ineffective?

Alan: I would never automate gameplay. There are too many human elements needed for a game to be successful - it has to be fun to play - ideally right at that point between too challenging, and too easy. If the game has a story line, a tester needs to experience that story line, evaluate it, and use it as a reference when evaluating gameplay.

Tools to evaluate cpu load or framerate during gameplay are usually a much better investment than trying to simulate gameplay via automation.

That said, there are some "what if" scenarios in games that may provide interesting bugs. For example simulating a user action (e.g. adding and removing an item) thousands of time may reveal memory leaks in the application. It really comes down to test design and being smart about choosing what makes sense to automate (and what doesn't make sense).

Hexawise: What is one thing you believe about software testing that many smart testers disagree with?

Alan: I don't believe there's any value from distinguishing "checks" from tests. I know a lot of people really like the distinction, but I don't see the value. Of course, I recognize that some testing is purely binary validation, but this is a(nother) example of where choosing more exact words in order to discern meaning leads to more confusion and weird looks than it benefits the craft of testing.

Industry Observations / Industry Trends

Hexawise: Do you believe testing is becoming (or will become) more integrated with the software development process? And how do you see extending the view of the scope of testing to include all the way from understanding customer needs to reviewing actual customer experience to drive the testing efforts at an organization.

Alan: I believe testing has become more integrated into software development. In fact, I believe that testing must be integrated into software development. Long ship cycles are over for most organizations, and test-last approaches, or approaches that throw code to test to find-all-the-bugs are horribly inefficient. The role of a tester is to provide testing expertise to the rest of the team and accelerate the entire team's ability to ship high-quality software. Full integration is mandatory for this to occur.

It's also important for testers to use data from customer usage to help them develop new tests and prioritize existing bugs. We've all had conversations before about whether or not the really cool bug we found was "anything a customer would ever do" - but with sufficient diagnostic data in our applications or services, we can use data to prove exactly how many customers could (or would) hit the issue. We can also use data to discover unexpected usage patterns from customers, and use that knowledge to explore new tests and create new test ideas.

There's an important shift in product development that many companies have recognized. They've moved from "let's make something we think is awesome and that you'll love" - i.e. we-make-it-you-take-it to "we want to understand what you need so we can make you happy". This shift cannot happen without understanding (and wallowing in) customer data.

Hexawise: In your blog post, Watch out for the HiPPO, you stated: "What I’ve discovered is that no matter how strongly someone feels they “know what’s best for the customer”, without data, they’re almost always wrong." What advice do you have for testers for learning what customers actually care about? To me, this points out one of the challenges software testers (and everyone else actually) faces, which is the extent to which they are dependent on the management system they work within. Clayton Christensen's Theory of Jobs to Be Done is very relevant to this topic in my opinion. But many software testers would have difficulty achieving this level of customer understanding without a management system already very consistent with this idea.

Alan: Honestly, I don't know how a product can be successful without analysis and understanding of how customers use the product. The idea of a tester "pretending to be the customer" based purely on their tester-intuition is an incomplete solution to the software quality problem. If you hear, "No customer would ever do that", you can either argue based on your intuition, or goo look at the data and prove yourself right (or wrong).

There's an important shift in product development that many companies have recognized. They've moved from "let's make something we think is awesome and that you'll love" - i.e. we-make-it-you-take-it to "we want to understand what you need so we can make you happy". This shift cannot happen without understanding (and wallowing in) customer data. Testers may not (and probably won't) create this system, but any product team interested in remaining in business should have a system for collecting and analyzing how customers use their product.

Hexawise: I agree, this shift is extremely important. Do you have an example of how using such a deep understanding of users influenced testing or how it was used to shift the software development focus. Since software testing is meant to help make sure the company provides software that users want it certainly seems important to make sure software testers understand what users want (and don't want).

Alan: First off, I prefer to think of the role of test as accelerating the achievement of shipping quality software; which is similar to making sure the company provides software customers want, but (IMO), is a more focused goal.

As far as examples go...how many do you want? Here a few to ponder:

We tracked how long people ran our app. 45% ran it continuously - all the time. This is the way we ran the app internally. But another 45% ran it for 10 minutes or less. We had a lot of tests that tried to mimic a week of usage and look for memory leaks and other weirdness, but after seeing the data, we ended up doing a lot more testing (and improving) of start up and shut down scenarios.

We once canceled a feature after seeing that the data told us that it was barely used. In this case, we didn't add the tracking data until late (a mistake on our part). Ideally, we'd discover something like this earlier, and than redesign (rather than cancel)

We saw that a brand new feature was being used a lot by our early adopters. This was pretty exciting...but as testers, we always validate our findings. It turned out after a bit more investigation, that the command following usage of the brand new feature was almost always undo. Users were trying the feature... but they didn't like what it was doing.

Staying Current / Learning

Hexawise: What advice do you have for people attending software conferences so that they can get more out of the experience?

Alan: Number one bit of advice is to talk to people. In fact, I could argue that you get negative value (when balanced against the time investment) if you show up and only attend talks. If there's a talk you like in particular, get to know the speaker (even us introverts are highly approachable - especially if you bring beer). Make connections, talk about work, talk about challenges you have, and things you're proud of. Take advantage of the fact that there are a whole lot of people around you that you can learn from (or who can learn from you).

Additionally, if you're in a multi-track conference, feel free to jump from talk to talk if you're not getting what you need - or if it just happens that two talks that interest you are happening at the same time.

Hexawise: How do you stay current on improvements in software testing practices; or how would you suggest testers stay current?

Alan: I read a lot of testing blog posts (I use feedly for aggregation). I subscribe to at least fifty software development and test related blogs. I skim and discard liberally, but I usually find an idea or two every week that encourages me to dig deeper.

Biggest tip I have, however, is to know how essential learning is to your success. Learning is as important to the success of a knowledge worker as food is to human life. Anyone who thinks they're an "expert" and that learning isn't important anymore is someone on a career death spiral.

Profile

Alan has been a software tester (among other roles) since 1993 and is currently the Director of Quality for Services at Unity. Alan spent over twenty years at Microsoft working on a variety of operating systems and applications in nearly every Microsoft division. Alan blogs at angryweasel.com, hosts a podcast (w/ Brent Jensen) at angryweasel.com/ABTesting, and on occasion, he speaks at industry testing and software engineering conferences.

Links Books: How We Test Software at Microsoft, The A Word

Blog: Tooth of the Weasel

Podcast: AB Testing

Twitter: @alanpage

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