Ten years ago, I was working on the Xbox One (at that time, code named “Durango”). We didn’t have actual Xbox-y looking development machines - just massively heavy and big PCs (imagine a super-heavy PC, and now double the weight) that roughly represented the components that would eventually be in the Xbox One. We called these beasts “DevKits”.
At the time, I was leading a virtual team building all of the dev and test tools for Xbox, and also reported directly to the XBox One Test Director. Every few weeks, I’d send out a Durango TestNews newsletter - at first to just my managers org, but eventually to thousands of people across the company.
Here’s that newsletter from April 1, 2012 - this generated just enough hate mail and outrage, that I think it fit the theme. I’ve added some text in <brackets> to get rid of jargon and acronyms.
From: Alan Page
Sent: Monday, April 1, 2012 7:13 AM
To: Durango Test News
Subject: Security, NUI, TARP, and Guide Guidelines
Time for another edition of TestNews. This communication contains time-sensitive material .
DevKit Security
We are still seeing reports of unlocked and unattended Durango development kits. Beginning immediately, we have a new policy for everyone in possession of a devkit. If you are going to be away from your desk for any amount of time, you must physically move your devkit to a locked and guarded conference room on the fourth floor (go here to sign up for access and request wheels for your devkit). This policy is in force any time you are out of view of your devkit, including, but not limited to: going home, attending meetings, getting coffee, going to the restroom, or visiting an adjacent office or work area. In addition, anyone in view of a devkit that is unattended must immediately move that devkit to the locked and guarded room on the fourth floor.
We realize that this policy is difficult, so we have enabled recovery options. If you accidentally leave your devkit unattended, Microsoft Security will be using twitter and OfficeTalk hashtags to enable potential recovery. If your devkit mysteriously disappears you may be able to recover it by including #whereintheworldismydurango and #IcantbelieveIjustdidthat hashtags in your updates to discover the fate of your devkit.
There will be no exceptions to this policy.
NUI <Kinect> Team Still Needs Your Help
Thanks to everyone who has given their time to help the NUI team gather input data. Due to a late breaking feature addition, we have one more request for participation.
We’re excited to add odor-tracking to the Kinect feature set, but we need data. The input space for smell-tracking is massive – and we need to build a matrix of odors for testing that reflects the customer needs as much as possible. We are confident that the Xbox Test Team has some of the most unique odors in the industry, and that we can gather the data we need quickly. If you’re not sure if you have any unique smells, please ask your friends - they often recognize smells that you don’t notice. If you have any unique smells from your home, car, or gym bag, please bring them to any member of the NUI team for analysis. We’re particularly looking for odors of mold, sweat, and 6-12 month old children. We’d also like to capture the odor of someone who has played SkyRim for at least 72 hours straight.
Please let us know if you able to contribute. In gratitude for your contribution, all participants will receive breath mints, deodorant, Febreze, or all of the above at the discretion of the NUI team.
Tonight at 11pm we will be kicking off a 9 hour Dance Central 2 smell-a-thon for anyone able to join in and get their “funk” on before starting up work in the morning.
Introducing TARP
Today, we are unveiling the Test Automation Result Parser (TARP) to aid in analyzing test results. We already have solid tools in Taef (test authoring), and Test Systems (Carbon and the Xbox Test Pass Tool (XTP), but TARP fills in the last bit of missing functionality by groveling test kits for all log files and test collateral. Once it gathers this list, it deletes all evidence of the test pass and reports success to the test owner. As testers, our time is far too valuable to focus on looking at test results, and with TARP, we can ensure that testers can stay focused on what’s truly important: PASS RATES.
Using the SDET Guide
Thanks everyone for using, and contributing to the SDET Guide. However, due to extensive use, we are running out of disk space on //Durango <internal server>. To help preserve space, we have converted all pages in the guide to use the Arial Light font. In addition, we ask that everyone stop using bold fonts in the guide unless absolutely necessary. The additional girth and weight of the bold fonts puts a lot of extra load on the disk drives, and by being judicial with our usage of bold, we can potentially store much more data at a lower cost. Also, please avoid the use of italics they dramatically reduce overall readability by focusing attention on specific words reducing the ability for most of the team to read entire pages or even emails.
Have a great April 1st.
I remember replying back to this email. :)