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I am very excited to see the latest version of Spec Explorer (which is available even for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 ) now available publicly for everyone in the world to leverage. It is available via the MSDN DevLabs page and the Spec Explorer team (the fact that there is a team dedicated to pushing...

Found this exceptionally inspiring, interesting and informative talk (I saw an internal version of the same talk) by James Whittaker (please subscribe to his blog if you remotely care about software quality), who is a pioneer in the software testing world. He also has a series of blog posts on this topic...

In the last 2 posts we have looked at what we mean by a model of a system and defined what States and State Variables are. In this post we'll look into Actions and Action Parameters. We can define an Action as something that modifies or exercises the system. Thus "TurnIgnitionOn" (in the car model...

This is a continuation of the Elements of MBT series of posts which I started last time with Part 1 and covered what is meant by a model of a software system. In this post I shall be covering additional concepts which you will need to know to gain a better understanding of Model Based Testing. One...

In this series of "Elements of MBT" posts, I will be covering some basic concepts used when trying to build models of software systems for use in Model Based Testing . The aim is to give an explanation of the various elements involved in defining a model of a software system and hopefully this should...

Question to the community: How can you best test a delete operation? For e.g. When you test the following API - DeleteObjectFoo("ABCD") - what should we test to verify that this function actual deleted "ABCD"? This API is just a placeholder for an API that deletes something. The question is that,...

The Process Monitor looks like a great tool to help in debugging issues and includes a bunch of features from a diverse set of sysinternal utilities such as RegMon, FileMon etc. I think this is the first tool offering to come out since the acquisition of Sysinternals.com and more importantly perhaps...

The future was here – now it’s the past. I am, however, wiser about the ways-of-the-model-based world. Still taking baby steps really, but starting to stand up on my feet. The real-world turned out to be a whole different ball-game from what I had envisioned (and read and expected) but it has been a...

All the technical jargon of the world put together cannot compensate for raw stupidity. I recently had this epiphany when I ran into one of those “DUH!” bugs in my test code. Made me feel like a fool and so I thought I would redeem some of my hurt ego by confessing and discussing general test code bugs...

Well - as promised here is the solution for the Spot the Bug (contest?) posting which was correctly answered first by Nat (Congratulations!). The Bug : The following line of code will fail intermittently when executed and most of the time rerunning will work. Sadly, these are the sort of bugs most easily...

Starting to see a lot of good discussion about what it means to be a test developer and the practices, ideas and challenges that go into being a successful test developer. In this post I want to talk about some insights about what I find challenging about this role and a question as old as the chicken...

Ran into this recently and thought it might be interesting. Can you try and spot the bug and the possible error that can occur with the following lines of code? Decimal randomDoubleAsDecimal() { Random rand = new Random (); return Decimal .Parse(rand.NextDouble().ToString()); } Solution in the next post...

Joel offers some great tips to Computer Science students (or really anyone in college who is a geek and likes software and programming) who will soon be graduating - very practical advice. In addition, it would be great to see fresh graduates trying to incorporate testing into their goals as well. I...

So have we reached the top of the graph predicted by Moore's law ? Seems like it (if not the top, very close to it), especially with respect to performance of a single, lonely processor. Herb Sutter has written a very nice article on how we are reaching the end of the road, or rather a bend in the road...

Nice to read about this very cool tool, zDrop , running on Commerce Server which helps eBay sellers to easily and cost effectively post and manage items on eBay. Would love to hear about any other publicly available tools you know of that utilize Commerce Server. P.S. - Sorry for not posting in a while...

Just posted an article on the Pesticide Paradox and how Model Based Testing can help alleviate that problem. Among others things Terrarium 1.2 seems to have been released. I have been wanting to create an organism and play with Terrarium for some time now (try and use Evolutionary Psychology tricks...

In this article I will be attempting to explain one of the biggest (or what I feel is the biggest) drawback of traditional automation testing – the phenomenon of product code becoming more resistant to the test code and resulting in less bugs being found over time by the same test code. This was...

Not sure if my article on Model Based Testing warranted an article or not (am not sure when exactly does a post qualify as an article - anyone know of any guidelines?), but I did put it up, partly because I wanted to try out the Article section of the .Text blogging application (on which the MSDN blogs...

In this article I will attempt to give a brief overview of Model Based Testing (MBT) and provide links to help you dig in for more details. I have been increasingly getting more and more fascinated (obsessed?) with this paradigm, which I believe holds great promise for the future of the software testing...

Pairwise Testing is such a cool thing if you ever have to deal with testing a program or an API that is suffering from a test matrix explosion (due to a large number of all permutation / combinations of all involved variables such as Operating Systems, Browsers, languages, Service Packs, large API parameter...