Buggle bug?

I was just playing Buggle over at The Casual Collective when I saw a rather unusual occurence. Normally, when the links between Buggles are made, they block each other. Somehow, though, in this one, we got a crossover.

Buggle Crossover

Posted by Garrett on October 22nd, 2007 in Gaming, Testing | 2 Comments

Testing on the Toilet

Google recently unveiled one of their secret weapons: they plaster testing tips all over their offices, including in the bathrooms.

Posted by Garrett on January 25th, 2007 in Google, Testing | 1 Comment

Hallmarks of a Great Tester

Michael Hunter, the Braidy Tester, did a presentation a few months ago about what makes a tester great. Afterwards, he cleaned up his slides and posted the presentation on his blog.

I want to be the tester that dev took out to lunch every day for a month to slow down his bug reporting. :-)

Update: Ah, I knew this looked familiar. Michael had posted on the subject before.

Posted by Garrett on September 2nd, 2006 in Microsoft, Programming, Testing | No Comments

Unit Testing for FoxPro

Doug Hennig blogs about the open-source unit testing framework for VFP, FoxUnit. He explains in detail how and why to use it.

I’ve known about Unit Testing and FoxUnit for a while now: I just haven’t come up with the right program yet to apply it.

Posted by Garrett on May 10th, 2006 in Testing, VFP | No Comments

Don’t be fooled by the coverage report

In one of the non-front-page articles, Slashdot points at this IBM article about why your test coverage report might not mean what you think.

Posted by Garrett on February 7th, 2006 in Testing | No Comments

Test-driven Development, and what it isn’t

Scott Bellware shows us, in detail, how Microsoft dropped the ball on TDD with VS2005 and related documentation.

Thanks to Mike Gunderloy for the link.

Posted by Garrett on December 5th, 2005 in Programming, Testing | No Comments

Testing and scalability

Eric Sink at SourceGear tells a story of how he created a test that exposed huge gaping holes in Vault 3.0. Good thing he found the issue before a client did. :-)

Posted by Garrett on October 31st, 2005 in Source Control, Testing | No Comments

Interesting story from inside the Fox team

John Koziol explains in more detail what the personal reasons were that led him to leave the VFP test team.

Posted by Garrett on September 21st, 2005 in Microsoft, Testing, VFP | No Comments

Testing Visual FoxPro

Many of the tests I write to verify functionality in VFP are fairly straightforward: sometimes, they don’t amount to more than a dozen lines of code. However, when I’m testing interaction with other parts of the OS, the complexity can go up by quite a bit.

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Posted by Garrett on December 15th, 2004 in Code Sample, Microsoft, Testing, VFP | No Comments

Using GDI+ to change your reports

I just spent way too damned long writing a test to demonstrate the new StringTrimming functionality in Visual FoxPro 9 reports.

In earlier versions, if your text was longer than the box in which it was displayed, it would cut off the text at the end at the last available space, with no indication this had happened. VFP9, though, takes advantage of GDI+’s string formatting features to add ellipses (…) showing that there is missing text.

The default is to add the ellipses at the end of the last visible word, but that isn’t the only option we have. Search for “StringTrimming” in the VFP9 help file for a description of the other behaviors.

Note before running the sample: there is a SUSPEND in the middle. When you hit that, go in to the report that just opened, right-click on “cField”, and turn off the “Stretch with overflow” checkbox. Then save the report and resume. I wasn’t able to find a way to do this that wouldn’t have been way more trouble than it was worth.

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Posted by Garrett on August 19th, 2004 in Code Sample, Testing, VFP | 1 Comment