Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, December 02, 2008
There are occasionally times during an automated test needs to create a temporary file during the execution of that test. The problem is that often this file is left behind on the system, or even worse stored in some obscure directory on a server. I say worse because those [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Templates can be useful tools to help increase individual efficiency and team consistency. Yet, I am sometimes quite surprised that some organizations lack standard templates for such daily routines such as bug reporting, status reporting, and even test cases. There are some in the industry who shun templates because [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Occasionally, the execution or outcome of a test depends on the operating system version on which the test is executed. Platform profiling is important because subtle differences in operating system platforms can affect how certain tasks are carried out, inclusion or exclusion of specific features or capabilities, work-arounds, or even [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Now, many of you probably know that I am a big fan of computer generated random test data that is a represents a reasonable sample data set from the total population of possible test data. (I refer to this a probabilistic stochastic test data.) So, why would I argue against [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Friday, March 28, 2008
It seems that many test automation efforts around the industry tend to focus on GUI automation, or automating functional tests primarily by manipulating GUI objects. In general, GUI automation tends to be a very expensive approach to test automation, and the automation efforts often end in failure or achieve [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Sunday, January 06, 2008
It has been awhile since I have written about test automation, so I thought I would start the new year off with a post about test automation. More specifically, I wanted to start talking about coding guidelines. Just as many development teams have adopted coding standards and guidelines the test [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, August 30, 2007
I never really understood why so many people external to Microsoft seem to be against the Microsoft strategy to increase the amount of automation we rely on to test our products. Test automation has become sine qua non at Microsoft for many valuable reasons. Although there are some uninformed managers [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, August 01, 2007
I am fascinated with the advances computing, and have always approached computing from the perspective of what can this tool do for me to make my life easier. As a professional tester I have a lot more work to do then I can reasonably accomplish in the limited timeframe allotted [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, July 25, 2007
When getting close to shipping a product and the team discovers a critical defect that must be fixed one of the first questions asked by the management team is, “how long will it take?” From a testing perspective they generally want to know 2 things; what has to be done [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, June 21, 2007
Anyone who has listened to me talk about automated test design knows that I loathe hard-coded strings in test automation. Yes, I know that static test data is important, but it is almost never a good practice to hard-code strings or other test data in the body of your test [...]