For those of you who haven’t worked at a software company (nice move by the way), the first look at a new software release brings a palpable feeling of excitement. Our engineering team just released the first Test Candidate for our next release. It contains the new wiki and a host of other new features. It is very exciting to see our wiki in reality after talking about it and planning it for the past several months. I can’t wait to see it out in the market and our customers using it.
The testing process is both exciting and boring at the same time. For the next 2 weeks, we will hammer the system as hard as we can. We’ll try to do everything we can to anticipate how users will use the system. We’ll test the “happy path” (when people use the software they way we anticipated) and more unconventional use cases that users will undoubtedly try. Each day we go through as many iterations and use cases as we can, and file any bugs we find.
The engineers in Stockholm and here then fix the bugs we find as we sleep, make improvements, and release a new test candidate for us to start all over on the following day. Starting next week, we’ll issue Release Candidates which will be closer to General Availability in quality. We’ll do several of those and ultimately release the software in about 2 weeks.
This process is very similar to what other software companies use, but we have it down to a science. Wish us Happy Testing!
