S11-801: Testing in Production: Your Key to Engaging Customers

Track: Test Process

Seth Eliot will show you how to use Testing in Production (TiP) to align your software development to your customers’ needs and discover those unarticulated needs that drive emotional attachment and market share. Seth will demonstrate the tools you can use to TiP and get direct, actionable feedback from actual users. Feature lists do not drive customer attachment, meeting key needs does. Seth maintains that getting prototypes and product in front of real users is crucial to uncover features that meet these key needs and quantify how much of an impact they will have. Understanding this impact is important since evidence shows that more than half of the ideas that we think will improve the user experience actually fail to do so—and some actually make it worse. Techniques like Online Experimentation and Exposure Control enable you to find what works and what doesn’t. Production however can be a dangerous place to test, so these techniques must also limit any potential negative impact on users. Seth shows several examples from software leaders like Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Google to show how Testing in Production with real users will enable you to realize better software quality.

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Session Speaker:

Seth EliotSeth Eliot – Senior Test Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Seth Eliot is Senior Test Lead at Microsoft where his team solves Exabyte storage challenges for Bing. Previously he was Test Manager for the Microsoft Experimentation Platform (http://exp-platform.com) which enables developers to innovate by testing new ideas quickly with real users “in production”. Testing in Production (TiP), software processes, cloud computing, and other topics are ruminated upon at Seth’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/seliot/. Prior to Microsoft, Seth applied his experience at delivering high quality software services at Amazon.com where he led the Digital QA team to release Amazon MP3 download, Amazon Video on Demand Streaming, and support systems for Kindle.