Testing

Testing software

The Joy of writing automated tests, a good example of writing tests before you write the code, using perl

http://magnonel.guild.net/~schwern/talks/Test_Tutorial/Test-Tutorial.pdf

IndustryTestingStats - how are people testing (automated vs. manual vs. etc)

AutomatedUnitTesting

CodeReviews

Using software from IBM (Rational): http://www-3.ibm.com/software/rational/offerings/testing.html

http://www.testingfaqs.org/ - an information resource for software testers

http://www.automatedqa.com/products/tc.asp: TestComplete - Automated Application Testing

Regression testing ERP systems: http://www3.software.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/rational/web/whitepapers/2003/teamtest_erp.pdf

Testing is not a silver bullet: http://www3.software.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/rational/web/whitepapers/2003/TP326.pdf

Testing networks/systems

Load and Performance Tools: http://www.testingfaqs.org/t-load.html

For $work, I've been trying to come up with a nice simple and clean design to make it as simple as possible to create unit tests for the Baan ERP system. I evaluated csUnit. The problem with many of the unit testing classes such as xUnit, jUnit, and dotUnit, is that they were designed for test driven development. In our case, we want to build test cases for hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Actually, we don't even have the code - just the compiled objects. We have a way of getting lists of forms out of each program, list of fields on each form, data types for each field, type of form (edit single object, edit multiple, groups, maintain, process, print, etc). But to tie several dozen programs/forms together is going to require some amount of scripting. We'd like to generate some testing harnesses, if you will, to use as a base. But to take the result of one form (eg, a new Employee ID) and another form (a new CustomerId) to create a new object (new Order).

One twist on this is that the only access I have to the ERP system is via a COM/ActiveX object, which brokers messages to remote DLLs on the HPUX/ERP system. It's kind of nasty, but it's simple and works.

I wonder if I'm better off checking out QARun or WinRunner or something like that.

--Wim

Commercial testers

I called up Mercury Interactive to get some information on WinRunner, their automated Testing tool. It's got an awesome feature set and is one of the best in the QA industry. Unfortunately that comes with a hefty price: $7000 USD per user. --Wim

Here's the link to Mercury Interactive's site for more information: http://www.mercury.com/

And specfically for WinRunner: http://www.mercury.com/us/products/quality-center/functional-testing/winrunner/