Last October after presenting a keynote at the Conquest software testing conference I was invited to speak at an internal quality conference at SAP. At first it may seem a bit odd because Microsoft and SAP do compete within one market segment; however we also do collaborative work on other projects. Regardless of the company we work for, I do believe that most software engineers are intent on doing the best possible job they can to produce the best possible product they can that will ultimately provide a high value solution to the end user customer.

The common theme throughout the conference was the need to improve quality. In my keynote I suggested that customers demand higher quality because the end user customers of today are very different than the customers of yesterday. Today, software permeates virtually all aspects of our life. Today, software is found in children’s toys, in our automobiles, and even in toothbrushes. A decade ago computer users were accustomed to periodic anomalies and  assumed it was the price of technology; however the end user customers today have much higher expectations of software and  presume it will simply work and provide an easy solution that offers some perceived value in their lives!

In my keynote address to the engineers at SAP I described how I would sometimes say “my Mom wouldn’t understand how to do such and such” when describing ambiguous functionality, but in order to remain successful and competitive in today’s market we need to consider designing and developing software for our children and future generations. Of course we want our existing customers (and my mom) to feel comfortable using our software, but it is readily apparent that our children want a very different experience and have higher expectations from software.

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 session on GUI test automation using C#. One speaker cancelled at the last moment, so I volunteered to present the globalization testing basics talk I presented at STAR West a few weeks before. At both conferences I promised the attendees a tool to generate strings of random Unicode characters, and while relaxing along the waterfront of Baltimore’s inner harbor (the weather was quite beautiful this weekend) I managed to finish the tool (at least I am meeting the functional requirements I wanted to achieve).

So, without further ado, on my site Software Testing Mentor is a new section for tools and utilities where you will find the tool I have named "GString." GString will generate random strings of Unicode characters between the ranges of U+0020 and U+FFFF up to 65,535 characters in length either as a fixed length string or a random length string. The ranges of Unicode code points that are not assigned to a language script, and special areas such as Private use and surrogate areas are excluded from the generated strings. The resultant string can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into the edit control you are testing. (I am already thinking that a 2.0 version will populate the edit control that has focus automatically.)

GString is written in C# and requires the 2.0 .NET runtime available from Microsoft if you don’t already have it installed on your computer.

Well, back up to Boston for a few days before heading home. If you have any comments about the tool (or find any defects) please let me know.

I recently presented a talk on a globalization testing; a topic I think is really interesting, yet I find that most people try to ignore the topic for various reasons. I think that when people start talking about globalization or internationalization testing, some testers and developers shut down mentally. I have heard some devs and testers say, "I don’t know how to read Japanese, so how can I test it?"

Well, after years of working in this area I discovered that a tester doesn’t have to know how to read, speak, or write another language in order to conduct testing which includes string data composed of characters from different language groups. The computer doesn’t know language, it simply knows a series of 0’s and 1’s. The glyphs which represent characters used in some written language is for human edification, but the computer really doesn’t know the difference between Greek, Russian, or Japanese.

I have been trying to convince testers for years to expand their input testing beyond the typical ASCII characters they see on the keyboard in front of them and include characters from various languages such as Japanese and Arabic, and Hindi. While most testers think this is really cool, I think we sometimes forget how to input Unicode characters from different language groups.

So, to solve that problem I have created a few job aids that provide step-by-step instructions to manually input characters and strings from different languages other than English. So, for those of you looking to expand your string testing capabilities please refer to the job aids I created on my new (work in progress) personal website Software Testing Mentor. The slides for the talk are also available in the Presentations section, but the simulations and examples used during the presentation are not yet posted. Also, I will add more job aids for Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew in the near future.