RST Meets Signals‐Based Testing
James Bach, Michael Bolton · 2025
Microsoft collects a massive amount of telemetry from users of Microsoft Office. This chapter describes signals-based testing, and shows how it fits with the Rapid Software Testing (RST) methodology. The key idea of signals-based testing is to generate interesting signal patterns in the lab and then to analyze them to spot problems. The team in Office responsible for the feature-gating capability found that the signals produced by our synthetic workloads allowed them to spot emerging problems when feature gates were turned off and on in different combinations. Over the years, the Office group developed the telemetry stream, and many of the assertions were converted to error events. The Office Performance team could detect performance problems based on markers in telemetry for high-priority Office features. RST sees testing as an ongoing, cyclical learning process. The Heuristic Test Strategy Model is a core tool of RST.