What's New!
June 2, 2010
The GloablTester automation library (GlobalTester.dll) is finally complete. This library provides methods to programmatically customize the user locale settings in the Region and Language control panel applet on Windows for including globalization tests in your automated test scripts. The customizable settings include date, time, number, currency, and location. Important: this library is only supported on Windows Vista and later.
Thanks to those folks who provided feedback on the beta release. If you would like to provide feedback or beta test new tools we develop don't forget to register for updates. Also, if you find any issues with the current release please let me know.
May 2, 2010
Well, unfortunately the GlobalTester automation library is not yet complete because my personal projects were a bit reprioritized by a request for the Babel random Unicode string test data generation tool for manual testing. The new Babel 3.0 tool includes more equivalent character partitions to better generate random strings based on specified patterns. Download the latest version of the tool here. The automation library can still be found here.
April 17, 2010
My background in globalization issues is part of the skills and knowledge that originally helped me land my first job at Microsoft. The Babel tool is intended to help testers generate strings across the Unicode spectrum, as well as random characters in a language group. Another aspect of globalization testing includes testing support for various national conventions such as time, date, number, and currency formats. These are usually set during setup, but can be changed manually via the Region and Language options control panel applet. Over the past week I have been working on some code snippets and a new automation library called GlobalTester. The GlobalTester automation library allows testers to programmatically customize many of the national conventions used around the world so testers can now incorporate globalization into their automated test scripts.
GlobalTester is now in beta (I have a few more things to add to it), and the documentation is...not there yet (I am working on it). But, the library is available for testers who are savvy with C# to test drive. There is also an example of usage for customizing the date format on my latest blog post.
March 2, 2010
Time is a commodity in short supply! Lots of 'reorgs' in my day job, new challenges and new responsibilities. I am happy to announce I am on the advisory board for the Automated Testing Institute and will soon be contributing to institute in a variety of ways. Stay tuned!
I occasionally post code snippets to my blog that some of you have found useful, so I have expanded the Automation Libraries section to include code snippets (with the first to be published later this week).
January 25, 2010
Thanks to the testing efforts and suggestions of my Test Automation class at the University of Washington, the new test data generation library EAddress 1.0 is ready for release. See the SDK notes to download the test automation library and usage information.
I am also very happy to say that I will be giving a keynote address at the Swiss Testing Day conference in Zurich on March 17, 2010. I will also be giving a one day workshop on combinatorial testing the day before the conference as well. I am pretty excited because this is my first trip to Switzerland, and I am anxious to see and hear about the great work going on there, and to meet new friends and colleagues.
I am also very happy to announce that I will also be giving a keynote address at the Testing & Finance conference on June 7-8 in Bad Homburg, Germany. It will be good to be back in Germany (the home of my maternal ancestors) visiting with my dear friends and meeting new ones.
January 18, 2010
This is Testing Mentor's 3rd year on the Internet! This year we plan to expand into new directions. We will continue to work on random test data generation tools and automation libraries. I have also been invited to share some automation techniques with the Automated Test Institute website. (Watch for updates here.)
Next week I plan to release my newest test data generation tool called EAddress which is a highly configurable library to generate a random string of ASCII characters for testing a valid or invalid local address part of an email address. See the SDK notes for usage.
I have also included a new Register for Updates feature on the site to help you stay informed of new or updated tools or job aids for software testers. Registering for updates simply means that I will add your email address to a private list so I can push updates to you. I despise spam and marketers so this list will never be shared or sold to anyone. Also if you let me know which of my tools you currently use, or the types of test data that you most frequently use in your testing that will help me prioritize work items.