[eldavido]

I used to work at Microsoft (SQL Server). It goes without saying, but getting here is an intentional, conscious thing Microsoft spends billions of dollars to achieve.

Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification engineers in the industry.

[tdicola]

Sadly many of the recent layoffs from MS have been in their QA and SDET/test engineering teams. The days of a strong testing discipline might be over for the company.

[radmuzom]

Reminds me of the great talk by Joel Spolsky[1].

Perhaps automated systems have become much better since Joel wrote this, but something from the talk I really liked -

"The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one."

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html