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A Look at a Test Data Generator When Pat McGee couldn't find the right tool for the job, he and his team wrote one in Visual Basic for Applications for Microsoft Excel. They used Excel for all the data entry and calculations. Several groups in the project ended up using the tool–including testers, developers, and database administrators. Read how they did it.
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Hidden Risks in Web Code A look at the HTML source code behind Web sites can often reveal security issues that would never be uncovered by those blissfully ignorant of the code. This bug report will examine two common methods of maintaining state and passing data in Web-based systems–hidden form fields and the HTTP GET method–and demonstrate some of the associated security risks through an examination of HTML code.
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Telling It Like It Is: Test Status Reports as Tools for Change Producing regular test status reports makes your progress—and problems—visible to those outside your group. Here's how spending a couple of hours a week on gathering and reporting results can be crucial to your software development team's success.
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Release Criteria: Is This Software Done? For any project, the big question is: "Is this software ready to release yet?" Explore how to answer that question with confidence, by learning how to define success and how to gain consensus on release criteria.
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A Lesson in Scripting: Improve Your Testing with Programming Skills You can write simple programs to help with your daily testing tasks using Perl or other scripting languages. Here's a primer on scripting languages and programming skills for testers.
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A Look at the Ruby Scripting Language The Ruby language has gained many followers recently. Ruby offers many of the same features that made Perl a popular scripting language, but also has the advantage of being a fully object-oriented language. While developing an object-oriented application in Perl might be a bit clumsy, Ruby supports object-oriented programming quite naturally. This can offer many advantages when developing a large testing application.
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Don't Use Bug Counts to Measure Testers Cem Kaner tells us why we should not use bug counts to measure testers. Using examples, he illustrates two problems: 1) bug counts are poor measures of individual performance; and 2) the side effects of using bug counts as a measure are serious.
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Computer Science 101: Software Testing? Summary: Where do you find new testers? For the most part, the answer is typically not "from your local university computer science or software engineering department." Testing just isn't taught as a subject in most university curricula. Here, James Whittaker suggests ways to get testing into your university.
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Generating Test Code with Teradyne TestMaster Robin Sahner looks at generating test code with Teradyne TestMaster. His group evaluated TestMaster on two projects. It did what they hoped it would, and now they're using TestMaster on all of their projects. They're not employing it to shorten their test development time or use fewer people; instead they plan to use it to get a more complete, more easily maintained set of functional tests using the same resources. Editors Note: Teradyne SST has become a new company called Empirix.
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No More Whining Johanna Rothman urges test managers to stop whining and deal with the "Not-Enough" problem. She concludes: "You have more capability to influence attitudes, behaviors, and actions in your organization than you know. If you feel like a second-class citizen, reframe the situation. Rethink your job and how you do it, and realize the importance of the contribution–finite, but powerful–you can make toward your organization's product quality."
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