Mark Mydland, Program Director for VSTS Test, in Nashville

Our favorite Microsoft geek chic Jennifer Marsman is bring the Program Director for Visual Studio Team System Test Edition, Mark Mydland, to Nashville on November 19th. Mark will be showing off some of the new test features in VSTS 2010. There will also be giveaways and free dinner. Space is limited so to RSVP please reply by email to Jeanne Waskiewicz or by phone at (615) 238-0333. Seating will be limited to only 60 guests, so please RSVP as soon as possible. Registration will close at 5 PM Monday the 17th or when we meet our cap of 60 attendees. The event will start at 6:00 PM at the Microsoft offices at 2555 Meridian Blvd, Suite 300, Franklin, TN 37067. Here is a Google map, but do not believe the satellite view. Below is more information about the presentation and our speaker:


Topic: Breaking Serve on Dev/Test Ping Pong in Visual Studio 2010

This has probably never happened to you, but picture this scenario: a tester finds a bug, writes it up, and sends it to the appropriate developer. The developer can’t reproduce the bug and sends it back. The tester digs around a bit more to find better repro steps. The developer insists it’s a configurable error of the tester. Back and forth we go. In VSTS 2010, this process is streamlined by automatically gathering critical information about the project and code and making that data available when, where, and to whom it is needed. During this talk, Mark Mydland (Principal Group Manager of VSTS Test) will demonstrate these cool new features and dive into technical topics on the new architect tools, some amazing research work for concurrency and for bounds checking, 3-tier execution, and data recording (aka “Tivo for debugging”).

Speaker: Mark Mydland

Mark Mydland is the Principal Group Manager for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers product at Microsoft. In the past 12 years, Mark has worked as a developer and consultant across a wide variety of applications and industries. Mark first joined Microsoft in 2001 working as a member of the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD). During his time in that group, Mark was the development manager for a team focused on analytics for assessing the efficacy of natural language interpreters with a particular emphasis on driving authoring simplification and relevance quality for user assistance. Based on this work, Mark filed numerous patents and coauthored a paper for the SIGIR journal. In 2004, Mark left Microsoft to work as a Director of Development at Getty Images where he led a change in process from a traditional waterfall methodology to a scrum-based agile approach which brought the release frequency from 12-18 months down to 1 month. Since Getty made extensive use of VSTS, it seemed a natural fit for Mark to join VSTS on his return to Microsoft in 2006. Mark received his B.S. from West Point in 1991. He has also held positions with USWeb/marchFirst and Andersen Consulting/Accenture.

We would like to thank Compuware for sponsoring the event.