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Category Archives: Testing Tools

Troubleshooting Test Data with String Decoder

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Originally Published Wednesday, February 25, 2009
I value static test data that is derived from historical failure indicators, or representative of typical end-users. But, of course a problem with static test data is that it only provides a limited set of all possible data, and becomes stale or provides little new information after multiple iterations [...]

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Random String Generation…Update!

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Originally Published Tuesday, February 17, 2009
One of the biggest challenges in input testing is the sheer amount of potential characters and the virtually infinite number of permutations of those characters in different character positions in a string. Even if we know about the myriad of language scripts used throughout the world, manually generating characters from [...]

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Babel – A ‘New’ Random Unicode String Generator Test Tool

Friday, November 13, 2009

Originally Published Thursday, September 20, 2007
For some time I have wanted to add surrogate pair character support to a tool I developed called GString, and this week I managed to find some time to do that work and more! As I developed the methods for surrogate pair support I rewrote (refactored in developer parlance) some [...]

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Random Test Data Generation

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Originally Published Wednesday, May 30, 20
I am not a big fan of static test data, so this month’s issue of Software Testing and Performance magazine published an article I wrote outlining one approach for generating random string data (although the basic concepts can be used for generating other types of random data).
Unfortunately, it appears that [...]

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More on Generating Strings with Random Unicode Characters

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Originally Published Sunday, December 24, 2006
Well, for those of you living outside the Pacific Northwest you are probably unaware of the recent wind storm with winds gusting to 60+ miles per hour that left more than 1 million people on the eastern side of the state without power. The damage was pretty extensive, and since [...]

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More on Globalization Testing and Random Unicode String Generation

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Originally Published Sunday, November 12, 2006 3
After a week in Boston presenting at the 3rd Software Testing and Performance Conference I am relaxing in Baltimore (where I grew up) visiting family and friends. For the second year in a row I presented a workshop on functional and structural testing techniques, and also presented a double-track [...]

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Allpairs, Pairwise, Combinatorial Analysis

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Originally Published Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Last week I went to StarWest as a presenter and as a track chair to introduce speakers. Being a track chair is wonderful because you get to interface more closely with other speakers. Anyway…one of the speakers I introduced was Jon Bach. Jon is a good public speaker, and I [...]

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Disadvantages of Ruby for Test Automation

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Originally Published Thursday, June 08, 2006
In the past few years there has been a push to use Ruby as a programming language for test automation. Ruby as a programming language has some benefits compared to other scripting languages. However, for test automation or any other serious application development the disadvantages of Ruby certainly outweigh any [...]

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