Teknologika - The .Net, software testing and mac weblog of Bruce McLeod

.net on the iPhone?

2008-07-04T11:31:44.7581232+10:00

There is a little project called Monoobjc which is a mono to Objective C bridge that allows you to use the native Mac OS X libraries in .net code on the mac.

That is pretty cool, but one of the features is to allow the .app folder to contain the mono dll's that it needs and execute with out the mono runtime installed.

So if you take that one step further, it should be possible to build an iPhone app, the same way and just bundle the mono code along for the ride.

So I wonder how long it will take until this happens, my bet is someone will do it in less than six months.

A word on exploratory testing

2008-06-28T12:03:09.4906960+10:00

Anne-Marie Charret has posted about her desire to keep test documents when doing Exploratory testing.

On my current project we are delivering in excess of three thousand requirements, and with each requirement spawning up to six test cases, we were simply drowning in a sea of tests.

To try and survive this, and complete the project with my sanity intact, something had to change. There were a lot of changes, however the main change that I instigated was to introduce the option of performing exploratory testing when the requirement was delivered. Documenting the tests as we performed them, instead of a huge up-front planning process. This ensures that we still maintain a record of our test case to requirement traceability

Well did it work? I am happy to say, yes. Instead of spending most of our time in front of Microsoft Team Foundation Server, we spent the time in front of the application finding bugs.

A different kind of robot

2008-06-12T13:30:44.8497536+10:00

With Microsoft robotics studio around these days a lot of guys are now playing with various kinds of robots, including some guys that I have worked with. Rob is playing around with a Lego Mindstorms robot and Dan has been working with a KHR2HV.

Well I am not about to start shouting me too. My brother and I have been working on a completely different type of "robot" that is currently controlled by DOS based software.

If you are curious what this is going to be used for you can head over to my other blog and see the details.

Ie Tester

2008-06-04T12:33:47.5765824+10:00

Need to do browser compatibility testing for IE 5.5, 6, 8 and 8 ?

IeTester should do the trick. It's a stand alone application that contains all 4 rendering engines.

Pex is now publicly available

2008-05-26T14:35:17.2146672+10:00

Microsoft Research have finally released Pex. "Pex (Program EXploration) is an intelligent assistant to the programmer. From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. In addition, it suggests to the programmer how to fix the bugs."

Look for a more detailed post on using Pex shortly, and yes, it will involve triangles. :-)

Wondering why the WWMX GPS Track Download crashes on vista ?

2008-05-08T15:50:38.9673952+10:00

I use a GPS when I go sailing to record and analyse my performance. It's a cheap as chips Garmin eTrex, and to download the tracks I use the GPS Track Download application created by Microsoft research for the World Wide Media exchange project.

I recently reinstalled Vista on my new machine and trying to down load the GPS track-log, the application kept crashing. To solve this problem I turned to process monitor. Process monitor replaced file monitor and quickly showed that the app tries to download to a default, hard coded directory c:\My Documents that didn't exist then boom, no error was shown and the application crashed. A classic Severity 1 issue.

To stop the application crashing you simply need to create this directory, but it also shows that when writing an application you should never hard-code file paths. The application should have prompted if it's default directory was not found and ask for the user to specify one.

Another UI Automation testing framework

2008-05-08T12:51:17.5832848+10:00

In addition from white there is another UI Automation library on codeplex. The UIA Verify framework has been developed by the UI automation team. To quote the project page on codeplex.

UI Automation Verify (UIA Verify) Test Automation Framework

UIA Verify is a test automation framework that features the User Interface Automation Test Library (UIA Test Library) and Visual UI Automation Verify (Visual UIA Verify), the graphical user interface tool. The framework facilitates manual and automated testing of the Microsoft (R) User Interface (UI) Automation Provider implementation of a control or application. The majority of the UIA Verify functionality is provided through a dynamic link library (e.g., UIATestLibrary.dll) that contains the code for testing specific UI Automation functionality and supports logging of the test results.

With the Visual UIA Verify, you can quickly find and select any UI element anywhere on the desktop. Based on the specific control type and the supported control patterns, UIA Verify provides the built-in test scenarios prioritized for the particular UI element. Developers can add additional test scenarios by adding the code to the UIA Test Library. The tool can output the test results or the summary in various forms. Visual UIA Verify can output test details in HTML

And I was wondering why my ADSL kept dropping out

2008-05-07T11:52:45.6863264+10:00

My ADSL line kept dropping out when plugged in to the phone socket in the back room. I climbed under the house to see what was going on and then I discovered this ...

Now that mess has been removed, things are much better !

Wikipedia testing portal

2008-04-29T14:35:18.9116983+10:00

I find myself referring more an more to the wikipedia software testing portal. It is a great source of testing terminology and a good reference. If you haven't seen it before I suggest that you have a look around.

How good a tester are you?

2008-04-08T10:58:52.3694329+10:00

sanity prevails

2008-03-07T14:04:50.9029984+11:00

Internet Explorer 8 will use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default.