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Magic Numbers: Integers

After many moons of sitting in a queue somewhere, the MSDN Tester Center just posted my intro article on special numbers you probably want to think about when running tests. The paper addresses several interesting domains of integers (all the way up to Read More...
Posted Friday, October 09, 2009 10:37 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Test Plan Template

While looking at some of the traffic statistics for the MSDN Tester Center , I noticed that a bunch of people arrived at the site as a result of doing a Google search for "test plan template". The primary starting point for a template is really the IEEE Read More...
Posted Friday, October 02, 2009 10:51 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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The Brute Tester

A co-worker of mine was working on a tool to watch our release share for the appearance of a test result file, for which he would then publish up to a TFS server. The "trx" results file in question is actually being created on the Xbox console by our Read More...
Posted Monday, June 01, 2009 10:47 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Upcoming Testing Conferences (2nd half of 2009)

Here is my semiannual post on testing conferences that will be occurring later this year. CAST July 13 - July 16 Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA ISSTA July 19 - July 23 Chicago, Illinois, USA softec July 20 - July 22 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia STANZ August Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 13, 2009 10:20 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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Upcoming Testing Conferences (1st half of 2009)

Here are the links and dates for some of the testing related conferences which are approaching. Future Test February 24 - February 25 New York, New York, USA Swiss Testing Day March 18 Zürich, Switzerland ANZTB March 23 - March 25 Sydney, Australia SEPG Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 04, 2008 8:56 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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Testing when "the code is the documentation"

Throughout the course of my testing career, I've often heard this dreaded statement. Despite the causes behind it, I think that there will always be times when you just won't get any formal documentation or specification on how a piece of software is Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 03, 2008 3:03 PM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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Security Tools: Codenomicon

About three years ago, when the Xbox 360 was getting close to launching, we went through a security pass of the audio and photo playback capabilities. One of the tools that was recommended to us by another employee was the Codenomicon suite of test files Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 26, 2008 2:58 PM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Developer Tip: Add a blank macro so testers can inject code

While I was working on writing some API tests for a module that was being integrated into the Xbox Dashboard application, there was some rework to the class that happened in the middle process. In doing so, the developer decided to make a bunch of the Read More...
Posted Monday, August 11, 2008 9:39 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Upcoming Testing Conferences (2nd half of 2008)

I was talking with a test manager yesterday about recruiting opportunities, and he was wondering about what testing conferences were coming up in the (fairly) near future. So here is a listing of some of them: STANZ August 11 - August 12 Wellington, New Read More...
Posted Wednesday, July 30, 2008 1:25 PM by joshpoley | 2 Comments
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Know Thine Product's Language

As a technical tester (SDET), you are expected to help find bugs that are written in the programming language used by your product team (SDETs commonly contribute by writing test code and tools). To this end, you truly need to understand and master that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2008 8:36 AM by joshpoley | 1 Comments
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Colossal Handle Leak

So I was un-installing an application (which I won't name) and just happened to notice a rather large handle count in Task Manager. Now, most applications which leak handles will consume on the order of several thousand handles, but this program (which Read More...
Posted Monday, May 05, 2008 10:07 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Selecting Random Seeds

A few months ago I ran across some test code which was using GetTickCount () + timeGetTime () as the seed input to a random number generator. Unfortunately this code was bad for two reasons. First, the systems that the test code was running on would be Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 04, 2008 9:25 AM by joshpoley | 2 Comments
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API Testing Best Practices

MSDN just published my article on API testing : " If you ask several testers how to write good API tests you will get several different answers. Not only are peoples' styles and approaches different, but often API sets will lend themselves to various Read More...
Posted Friday, February 29, 2008 7:58 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Tester Center: White-Box Fuzzing

The Tester Center recently added some more content. One of the new articles is a pretty good piece on Fuzzing , so check it out when you get a chance: This article presents a case study of fuzzing during development of Microsoft Internet Security and Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 12, 2008 4:32 PM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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Testing Your PDB Files

Very little attention is often applied to PDB files, but if you do ship them to customers, then you will want to ensure they don't contain more information than is necessary. The debugging information stored here can be used to reverse engineer or attack Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 10, 2008 9:52 AM by joshpoley | 0 Comments
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