Introducing the Team

I thought that the first post should lay some common ground about how the team is composed and what products we ship.

Internally, the ASP.NET Team has been renamed a couple of times (things like, "Web Platform and Tools", "UIFx Server") but no matter the name, our team is responsible for delivering what is commonly known simply as "ASP.NET ". Some of the things that ship directly from our team:

• The big pieces
• Everything in the System.Web assembly that is shipped as part of the .NET framework.
• Everything in System.Web.Extensions assembly (what was formerly known as the Atlas project).

• Other less known pieces
• We own the control designers for all the controls that we ship as part of the framework, these are included in the System.Design assembly.
• The MMC snap in to configure an ASP.NET site.
• All the aspnet_*.exe that you see in the framework directory (like aspnet_regiis.exe, asonet_regsql.exe).

The ASP.NET team is subdivided into 3 main disciplines: PM Team, Dev Team and the QA Team (which is pretty common within Microsoft). Needless to say, we all work very closely together, but each team is specialized in its own discipline.

Now, talking about the QA team. We are a team of 15 testers, and our goal is quite simple: ensure that the right set of features for our customers are delivered with the right level of quality. In a day to day basis, the main responsibilities of a tester in our team are:

• Contribute in the design of features along side Dev and PM. This is an area that makes ASP.NET a great team for testers to work in: we can directly contribute to the design of the product.
• Act as the customer and build web applications to validate the design and implementation of the product.
• Ensure quality of the product in the following areas: functionality, stress, performance, security, accessibility, localization, globalization, hosting, etc.
• Write automated tests to ensure code changes do not regress existing functionality.
• Being the last gate keepers of every release, we are responsible for making the final sign off for a product to be shipped.
• Acting as developers, we design and implement our test infrastructure, framework and tools.
• Service all previous versions of ASP.NET, ensuring the right quality of hot fixes and patches by running our automated test bed.

In future posts we plan to present several of our test methodologies, share our experience on what has worked well, how we write and run automated tests and tips on how test ASP.NET

And since I have been asked several times before: for those interested, there are 7 program managers in the PM team and 21 developers in the Dev Team. If there is interest, we can describe the tasks that each discipline has within the team in some later post.

Federico Silva Armas

ASP.NET QA Team