Version 1.0 of TestersDesk.com Community Edition (FREE) released

Dear member,

The first version of the Free Online Community Edition of www.TestersDesk.com is released on the 27th of March 2009.

All the registered users during the beta phase are members of the first release as well, and can happily continue to use the Community Edition for any purpose.

During this tough times, we continue to stand and accelerate our R&D in building tools that help testers in the areas of Test Design and Test Data Generation for Software Functionality Testing. The sequence of awards in the last one year, the ever growing world-wide userbase; and the alarming need for speed in test design drive us in building the toolkits.

What’s new?

The toolkits have come a long way in terms of their own quality, and following are a few points to note on what’s new-

• The tools take inputs in different languages now. 
  
• There are new design tools (T-way TestCase Generator that can generate tests with 3-way,4-way,5-way interaction coverage, there are tools to create subsets out of larger sets and to generate permutations). 
  
• There are several Common Test Data Generators that software functionality testers need from day-to-day. 
  
• The interface has been productized into a rich application both in terms of look and feel; as well as on the data-orientation parts like CSV/XML support etc. 
  
• More help has been added in the homepage (articles/video) as well as at the tool level inline help.
  
• A new tool titled “OS Information Scripts” has been added that provides vb script utilities that can be used in test investigation and collecting system information. 
  

What next?

• The Community Edition will continue to serve the testing community free of cost. We will add more tools, user feedback as a continuous process.
• As a general note on our value roadmap, we have several new types of tools under development, planned for release later this year; mainly a Test Automation Data Accelerator and an Auto Test Case Author, both of which target generic Software Functionality Testing. The members of the Community Edition will be notified when these commercial tools are ready.
  

Thanks,
Ashwin.

Ashwin Palaparthi
Founder
ValueMinds Solutions (P) Ltd.
504, Techno Residency,
Techno Enclave,
Opposite to K. Raheja IT park (Mindspace),
Software Units Layout,
Madhapur,
Hyderabad - 500 081,
India.
Phone: +91-40-23114510

TestersDesk.com - The One-source Online Toolkit for Software Test Design and Test Data Generation.

Being among the shortlisted finalists from Hyderabad Startups

Recently, the event held at HYSEA for Products Showcase and Awards has seen more nominations than ever. We were proud to be among the 5 shortlisted finalists. What gave use more satisfaction was the number of testers (or software professionals who care for testing) who stopped by our demo stall.

While we are yet to launch our first version of the FREE Online Community Edition, this recognition(among a few other) ascertains the potential in the line of value we deliver- The One-source Online Toolkit for Software Test Design and Test Data Generation.

Our team was as vibrant as ever, and as usual, the feedback from the visitors also created a good backlog of items to work upon!

Thanks to the Hyderabad Software Exporters Association for stimulating us during the so-titled tough(est) times.

Pairwise test case generator- choosing what and how to test judiciously

This is one of most commonly sought after question (be it in testing projects or even when an interviewer wants to test the tester!) is “How do you choose what to test and how do you ensure test coverage when time and other resources are limited and you need to get the best out of pressing schedules?”

Well, one obvious answer is to base on experience based test selection.

But from the Test Coverage perspective, a powerful mechanism exists to judiciously and intelligently reduce the mind blowing number of possible test cases to a few. Pairwise Testing- some of us know it, and wikipedia always says more for the rest of us.

There may be other strategies and techniques but my favorite is the pairwise testing technique. At TestersDesk, the pairwise test case generator is designed for such occasions and you can reduce the total number of test combinations to an intelligent few.Take a case where a particular feature (let us say 'printing') has to be tested and you want to determine how printing your web-page works with different operating systems, browsers, paper sizes etc.

Let us say following are the test parameters and their values:

OS:Win XP,Redhat Linux,Macintosh
Browser:IE 6,IE 7,Firefox,Opera
Orientation:Portrait,Landscape
Size:A3,A4,A5
Color:Mono,Multicolor

The total combinations that need to be tested are 3 operating systems X 4 browsers X 2 types of Orientation X 3 sizes X 2 types of Color, that is, 144.

Pairwise Testing is a significant advancement in the evolution of Test Case Design techniques, especially those that deal with reduction of test combinations when the total number of combinations becomes too large to test.

Research has proven that most of the software defects occur in single mode and then in the dual mode. If you have tested a feature's test configurations covering the 2-way interactions (Pairs) of all the values of all the Test Parameters, you can say that you have done "sufficient enough" testing in most cases.

So for a 2-way (Pairwise) coverage of the example above, the Test Configurations can be reduced from 144 to 13 using the Pairwise Test Case Generator of TestersDesk. Please look at the table in this knowledge link that has a list of test metrics we have gathered to demonstrate the capability of pairwise generator (the "Capability metrics" section at the end of the page).

Isn’t this really an effective way to deal with the exploded number of test cases and tight schedules?And when you want to go for the 3 way or n way coverage, we have other tools as well to serve your various needs.

Happy testing!