Why does Microsoft hire housewives for software testing?

Software testing is a brand-new discipline. Currently, the research is not very in-depth. It only involves testing numbers, testing functions, and other very simple problems. It can be said that software testing is still in the infancy stage. Software testing, as a growing major, has already been opened in universities in the United States. The software testing discipline is not yet mature, and there is no final conclusion on what kind of professional foundation it requires, and there is no good standard to measure the advantages and disadvantages of a tester. Dr. Chen honggang used Microsoft as an example to describe the software testing method.

Software testing engineers: they are responsible for understanding the functional requirements of products, testing them, checking for software errors (bugs), and determining whether the software is stable (robust ), write the relevant test specifications and test cases.

After a Chinese doctor visited Microsoft's headquarters, he felt very strange: "What do testers do? Why did Microsoft take more than half of testers when they were doing products ?" In fact, software testing plays a very important part in product development. This is a need and is explained by Microsoft from more than 20 years of practice, this is also the experience Microsoft has learned from the continuous failures.

We can feel that Microsoft's previous products sometimes crash, crash, and so on. Today's products are larger, more comprehensive, and more stable than those of the five years ago. Why? This is because the testing work is getting better and better, the testing staff is getting more and more experienced. In this regard, Microsoft once calculated a bill: At first, Microsoft, like everyone else, thought that testing is not important, but it is important for developers. Generally, a team has hundreds of developers, but only a few testers, and the salaries of developers are much higher than those of testers. After years of practice, companies have found that the cost of repairing a patch for problematic products is much higher than the cost of hiring several testers.

But what kind of science is software testing? No one knows. Everyone is just exploring. No one knows what background it needs. Therefore, only a few of Microsoft's testers are from computers, while others are from Russian, English, Mathematics, engineering, and biology ...... There are many types, but one thing is that testers must have a feeling.

Because the current software testing is still in the development stage, testers often rely on instinct, feeling, and talent for software testing. If you discover bugs just by using them as you do, it is not a real test. This is just the most basic test. You can only find problems for normal users.

Finally, I ended this article with an interesting and real story.

When I work as a test leader and manager at the Microsoft headquarters, I often need to recruit testers. When recruiting a person, I usually follow two principles: one is to check his logic, which is very important; the other is to check whether his thinking is weird and whether he can generate some strange ideas frequently. The first point can be cultivated by the day after tomorrow, but the second point is probably not cultivated by the day after tomorrow. There are some natural factors in it.

These two principles have been developed in my years of practice. Because the software testing discipline is not yet mature, there is no good standard to measure the advantages and disadvantages of a tester. What kind of professional foundation does it need. At present, it does not mean that computer science is the most suitable for Software testers.
I have personally hired a housewife as a Microsoft tester!

The housewife is in her forties and is the wife of a naval officer and mother of three children. She only graduated from high school and never even went to a junior college (there are very few people in the United States who have never attended a Junior College ). She is also very elementary in using computers and still learns from her daughter. Later, when she was bored at home, she decided to find a job and ran to Microsoft to apply for a job.

At that time, when I interviewed her, I found that her computer level was very limited and she could only meet the standard of one common user. However, I found her thinking was weird, and she had many strange ideas, so she could quickly find some problems. So I just asked her to try ie. As a result, she found several bugs on the spot. She came to look for bugs in one way.

Later, I told my boss that I wanted to hire her. The boss opened his eyes and said, "Are you crazy? You want to hire a housewife! (Are you crazy? You want to hire a housewife !)"

So I told him what I thought. He still thinks that it is incredible to have a family of women who have never been in college as testers. However, he finally said, "You are the hire manager. You make the demo! (You are a hiring manager, or you can decide on your own !)"

I finally decided to hire her. At the beginning, she had many problems. I only realized that she was very sensitive, but forgot about her other qualities. Because she has been a family-ready woman and has never stayed in a professional environment, she looks very rude and often makes loud noises. She uses office phones to make loud calls and smoke in the office, we often recommend that you go to the back of others and proudly tell others: "I just found a bug! (I just found a bug !)", It seems that no one else can find the bug. However, after I warned her, she tried to correct these problems and worked very seriously. She learned very quickly. After three months, she became very professional. Finally, my boss admitted that she was really amazing and turned her into a formal employee. Now she is probably the test leader.

From this example, we can see that a good ordinary tester does not need the professional foundation of a certain aspect (such as computer). We cannot evaluate the tester as common sense is to evaluate the developer. Developers certainly need professional foundation, but there are a variety of testers. For example, manual testing of IE does not require any professional foundation, they use (or even use) products as users and discover problems. The family woman has talent in this regard. I also recruited some biology and physics experts, but they did not do very well, far better than this family woman.