I recently had a discussion with Klaus Hemstitch, a Senior Software Engineer from Microsoft.
I was curious to find out how they tackle the difficult mission of building scalable and useful automated tests.
He has been working there for the last 7 years in the Office 365 team.
Each day his team makes sure that all the web components are working as expected in all major browsers.
1. How long have you been working at Microsoft and where did you work before?
Started working there in 2013, before that I worked 3 years at Adobe.
2. What are your responsibilities in the current role?
Our team is responsible for the functional automated tests for most of the web components from Office 365.
3. What are the biggest challenges regarding those tasks?
The biggest…
We all want to build maintainable tests for our web applications.
As a part of this goal, we want to avoid losing sleep over implementation details and focus on making our tests give us the confidence for which they are intended.
Those tests should be maintainable in the long run so regular changes don’t break them and slow our team down.
Iteration Speed / Realistic Environment
Some testing tools give you a short feedback loop between making a change and viewing the result, but don’t mimic the browser behavior precisely.
Other tools might use a real browser environment, but reduce…
George Pérez
Developer
