Thursday, January 14, 2010
This past weekend I was working on a new test tool library for generating random email addresses; specifically the local address segment of an email address. I know, there are already a lot of email address generators available and this could be construed as reinventing the wheel. But I wanted to give my students in [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, November 04, 2008
At a recent conference a speaker posed a problem in which a field accepted a string of characters with a maximum of 32,768 bytes, then asked the audience what values they would use for boundary testing. Immediately some of the attendees unleashed a flurry of silly wild ass guesses [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Last week I attended the Software Testing and Performance conference in Boston. I presented a workshop on Systematic Testing Techniques, as well as a talk on random test data generation, and combinatorial analysis. One way I continue to learn about our profession and increase my own knowledge is by going [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Published Thursday, August 07, 2008
Too often many tester’s mistakenly assume that functional techniques such as equivalence class partitioning, boundary value analysis, combinatorial analysis, etc. are simply "black-box" testing techniques. I suspect this rather narrow perspective of functional testing techniques is due to a lack of in-depth understanding of testing throughout the product lifecycle, and [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, February 27, 2008
This morning I installed Vista SP1 onto my laptop. I was pretty excited about this release of Vista SP1 because it includes some pretty significant performance enhancements. But, as I was preparing to teach an internal course I came across a new boundary issue. I thought, how fitting this comes [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, November 29, 2007
In the last post we decomposed the set of characters in the ANSI character set into valid and invalid class subsets for use in a base filename component on the Windows Xp operating system. The second part of the testing technique of equivalence class partitioning is to then use this [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, November 15, 2007
Again, I am remiss in my postings…too many irons in the fire these days. Two weeks ago, I posted a challenge to decompose a set of character data (The ANSI Latin 1 Character Set) into valid and invalid equivalence class subsets in order to test the base filename parameter of [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Wow…where does the time go? I was remiss last week in posting, and it has been a month since I posted about equivalence class partitioning. So, let’s get back to it shall we?
Equivalence class partitioning (ECP) is a functional testing technique useful in either black box or white box test [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Monday, October 08, 2007
I previously discussed various types of defects exposed via application of the boundary value analysis testing technique including a repaint problem, a casting problem, and a wrapping problem. While the minimum and maximum physical linear boundaries of a parameter are often easy to identify, it is surprisingly more difficult to [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
Originally Published Sunday, September 30, 2007
I have been teaching formal testing techniques for several years at Microsoft and University of Washington Extension. Techniques are systematic procedures to help solve a complex problem. A technique does not find all types problems; techniques are generally very good at finding very specific classes of defects. But, the usefulness [...]