Microsoft Test center aims to help corporate programmers avoid buggy code

Microsoft has put together a reference site it calls the MSDN test center. Its goal is to provide a community where software testers can share knowledge. Hunting around the site is a little confusing, but also a little entertaining. For instance, one page of the site is a list of testing personas … complete with pictures … of the stereotypical folks involved in testing. But the forum where corporate developers can get their questions answered by experts might be worthwhile. For instance, a corporate programmer who goes by the name of “sun_certified writes that at his new job, he seems to be the only developer that writes tests for his code and because he actually tests his code, his manager is pushing him to become the one-and-only software tester for the whole department. “I do not think it is a good idea for one developer to be writing the unit tests for even one other developer, not to mention a whole team of developers (there’s 10 of them)! I’m planning on making a case to my manager (who is kind of green at managing sofware dev projects) that this is not a good path to go down for several reasons … thanks in advance for your replies.” One Microsoft tester replied that this sounds like a Software Development Engineer in Test role at Microsoft, but that Microsoft usually has close to a 1 to 1 ratio of actual developers to testers. In any case, if you are involved in writing code for a new Microsoft project, this might be a cool resource for you. Check it out at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/testing/default.aspx