I’ve joined a new team within Microsoft called Protocol Tools and Test Team (or PT3 for short).

This group is a derivative of the netmon product group and is helping with tools and testing for protocols.

In particular, interoperable protocols as required by the Technical Committee [US anti-trust case settlement] and  European Commission anti-trust case.

The protocols are documented via “Technical Documents”.

I joined the team because of my belief that Model Based Testing (MBT) is a great answer for many problems, especially protocol testing.

Most Protocols are naturally described by state machines and frequently are a very natural fit for MBT.

Building on Microsoft Research’s work with ASML (and ASML/t) and Spec#/Spec Explorer, a new even easier to use version of Spec Explorer is being created (in a product group, not MSR!).  Prior developers of Microsoft MBT tools Wolfgang Grieskamp and Darren Fisher are also part of the team.  I’ve talked about ASML outside of Microsoft to various groups, e.g.

"Advanced Modeling, Model Based Test Generation and Abstract State Machine Language"  
Download Powerpoint presentation (1.01 MB)

 ASML was used in the Indigo team, e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/kavitak/archive/2004/01/25/62761.aspx

Another good intro to MBT via SpecExplorer is http://research.microsoft.com/projects/T5/ppt/Grieskamp.ppt