December 2005 Tool: ForceWindowVisible tool

A small free tool derived from sHideWin for forcing the display of hidden windows, even if they are off the screen.

March 2005 Essay: Excel For Test Data Generation

MS Excel, and spreadsheets in general, are the testers friend. I have written up some notes about how to use Excel and VBA to generate test data.

Start getting your test data under control

March 2005 Book Review: I Am a Bug

5/5

The only book, aimed at children (of all ages), to explain testing. Are you Adult enough to enjoy it?.

Find Out Here

March 2005 Essay: Context Driven Testing, A Personal View

This is the supporting page for a talk that I first gave at the North London British Computer Society in March 2005.

I wanted to explore what I thought about Context Driven, how context driven I am, and what I think it means to be context driven.

Paper and Presentations here

Feb 2005 Essay: Descriptive Words Aid Testing

Words, and how they affect cognition, perception, state and action, interest me. I wanted to experiment with a less linear and more diagrammatic communication format, so... I thought, and I drew, and I experimented, and I turned a textual blog entry into a single page of diagrams and boxed out text.

View the page

July 2004 Essay: NLP For Testers, A Brief Introduction

This is the supporting page for a talk that I first gave at the London Special Interest Group in Software Testing in June 2004.

NLP is a topic that I have found fascinating for a number of years now, and I use it to help me understand what it is I do when I test software. The supporting paper provides an introduction to the NLP Meta Model and some observations on how it affects my thinking about Software Testing.

Quickly add some NLP to your testing here

April 2004 Case study: Generate www news and rss feeds

This Compendium-TA case study documents the use of Compendium-TA to maintain, generate and upload the news information and rss feeds on this site. [pdf] or [html]

All the required VB Script and documentation is available for download (as zip or self extracting .exe)so you can use Compendium-TA as a simple blog and web news system.

And as an extra bonus, read the tips on generating svg graphs from Compendium-TA generated wmf files [html][pdf]

March 2004 Essay: Alternative Test Tools In Action

I went through a process of self-evaluation to understand better how I test, how I think about testing and the tools I use. This paper discusses the tool strategies I use and is an introduction to the world of free and cheap tools available to help us do testing.

See cheap and free tools in action now.

December 2003 Essay: Be a Better Tester, Be a Beta Tester

In December of 2003 I went to EuroStar, presented "Be a Better Tester, Be a Beta Tester" where I expounded the benefits of downloading software off the internet and testing it. The accompanying paper lists a whole bunch of tools and web sites that can be used and describes the approaches and motivations for doing this. Beta Testing is something that I have gained a lot from so I always encourage other people to do it.

Now Read it and get beta testing.

20/10/2003 Essay: Tom Gilb Competitive Engineering Course Review

In September of 2003 I attended courses conducted by Tom Gilb based on the work presented in his Competitive Engineering book. There was a lot of useful information on these courses that relate to testing and this is a short write up of the courses and some of the basic principles of Competitive Engineering.

Read it now.

19/6/2003 Essay: Practical Experiences in Graph Based Testing

I went off to StarEAST 2003 and spoke about my experiences with graph based testing, the tools I use and the models of testing that I have built up in order to conceptualise a context within which graph based testing can work.

The paper also looks at how higher level models can help reduce the work involved in manual scripting.

Read it here now.

21/8/2002 Book Review: Lessons Learned in Software Testing

5/5

Most of us learn lessons the hard way, and books which can help us avoid that are welcome. After reading this you may want to learn some memory improvement techniques - or just carry the book around with you, whatever works for you.

...Being suited for Stichomancy is not the best prerequisite for a sit down and read sequentially book reading strategy. It is however a very good prerequisite for a long lasting, dip in and out book. These are very good volumes to remind you of concepts, techniques and to give you pause to catch your breath during times of pressure...

Learn some lessons.