Weekly essays on testability, testing and being a tester.
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The Australian Physicist, Sir Richard Threllfall (1861-1932) remarked in 1898 - "Though, no doubt, a great deal can be done with inferior appliances where great economy of money and none of time is an object, the writer has long felt very strongly that Read More...
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Creating URL configurable Visual Studio Web Tests I recently joined a project with a lot of web based APIs. This is pretty typical and Visual Studio 2008 let me start creating load tests literally within hours of being accepted onto the project. I quickly Read More...
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Consider replacing strings with Enums in resource references. I see code like this all the time in test and XNA and I really dislike it. MyCustomResourceClass resources = new MyCustomResourceClass(); MyImageClass currentImage = resources[ "Image 1.jpg" Read More...
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I have noticed some code in various places that creates some conditions for mysterious test failures. You know the kind; “It works on my machine but will never seem to run in the lab.” In our tests its sometimes desirable to have a unique identifier. Read More...
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Something tests end up doing a lot of is working with permutations and combinations. For those of you who didn't have the benefit of a good statistics class in college (or some gambling experience after) doing the math can be a hassle. Generating all Read More...
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When I speak of unit tests, sometimes there is a slight communication breakdown. Just becuase a developer wrote a test in the unit test harness does not a unit test make. This post does a good job of drawing a line in the sand. Read More...
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Please stop re-inventing the wheel. There are a lot of software wheels that get re-invented all the time. Re-inventing is a time consuming waste that many projects can cut. In almost all cases it’s much better to do some due diligence and use an off the Read More...
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Writing code for today and tomorrow Any developer working at a pace that will allow them to stay employed creates bugs. Testers get excited about a lot of different bugs. Testers should be lobbying for fixes that will have the biggest impact on the software. Read More...
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Planning Software projects Part 1 Good planning is critical to delivering software. Anyone who has shipped a product knows that the plans we start with rarely survive the entire release process intact. Too many of the plans we start with are useless by Read More...
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Planning software projects Part 2 Plan how you will work Plan your infrastructure first In order for your team to be successful you will need to have some processes running smoothly. Builds, setup, automated testing, bug reporting and status are vital Read More...
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Today I wanted to export a hyper-v machine to a share on a computer with more disk space. However I got this error: 'General access denied error' ( 0x80070005 ). I didn't have enough disk space to just make it locally and transfer it over. I really should Read More...
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Book Review: The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live with Technology by Kim Vicente This book is required reading for everyone who develops technology for people to use. Vicente uses the phrase “human-tech” to describe technology that is Read More...
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Working Smart in Test A situation came up this week with two different testers in my team. They both asked about the approach they were taking to a problem. Both of them were doing a lot of testing and they were trying to decide on a depth-first or breadth Read More...
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Ok, this is just plain old fun. Here is a "map" of my last 3 blog posts. Click for full size. Read More...
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Practical debugging; Apply some science to the problem Untested software has bugs. As we test software we find a lot of different kind of bugs. We want to identify the root causes for as many bugs as we can. Finding root causes can be fiendishly difficult Read More...
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