Engineering Excellence Award

Every year Microsoft holds an Engineering Excellence Conference that includes a number of keynote speeches, and sessions around engineering best practices. They also hand out a few awards to recognize innovation in tools and practices that enable better engineering, have broad impact, and adoption.

I'm honored to be part of 1 of the 4 groups recognized this year and here's a picture to prove it. :)

Engineering Excellence Award

I also received a framed letter of recognition that says:

On behalf of Microsoft, we want to congratulate you on your outstanding contributions to engineering excellence during the past fiscal year.

In recognition of your noteworthy efforts - stemming from your passion, determination, and leadership - you have been chosen to receive the Engineering Excellence Award. Your innovation is considered worthy of implementing across Microsoft product lines and has significantly improved our products and practices, and our customers' and partners' experiences.

...

By enabling closer collaboration between testers and developers, Gumshoe allows testers to quickly analyze untested areas of code and design additional tests from a white-box test design approach. Developers have indicated higher confidence in the quality of test coverage. Gumshoe directly impacts the quality of our products by reducing the number of downstream regressions, pushing quality upstream to help stabilize features, and increasing confidence in test coverage. You have developed an effective solution that delivers increased quality, improved automation, reduced costs, and minimized risk to Microsoft, our partners, and our customers.

The Engineering Excellence Award is among Microsoft's highest awards for engineering group employees worldwide. This award recognizes and rewards individuals and teams that have pioneered noteworthy innovations in their drive for engineering excellence. Receiving the Engineering Excellence Award is a level of recognition that only a few of our finest employees achieve. Everyone involved in this project should be extremely proud of this accomplishment.

Congratulations on your achievement, and thank you for your efforts.