Open Office developer contest

Just saw this:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Developer_Article_Contest

I've been thinking of switching over to the Dark Side myself. Not Perl, Microsoft.

I often use Microsoft Office at work, and my previous post touches on something I've wanted to do frequently, namely, get data in a more manageable format. Who doesn't? And not just PDF Bug reports.

What could be more fun than taking a requirements document (probaboly output from Rational Requisite Pro in the distant past) and turning it into a table in a database that can be cross-referenced with my (possibly Microsoft Excel - based) test conditions.

I could think of a couple things worse (Mercury Test Director, I'm looking at you.)

Okay, maybe my life isn't exciting enough. After 6 months travelling the globe (to Fiji & Ecuador) I get back to work and in only a month, my fondest desire is to convert Word documents and Excel spreadsheets into usable data.

If I can solve that problem, maybe it'll get me back to the southern hemisphere permanently.

A satellite connection and a rugged laptop and a sailing catamaran and a telecommute contract are my wildest dream, but usable information is a close second... or maybe distant third.

So I've been toying with the idea of learning C#. Or VB.NET. I've been looking at what makes SAMIE and PAMIE tick, and I recently discover JACOB and Jiffie, and have been meaning to look at Watir.

Note: Is there a similar PHP framework using COM? How stable is PHP with COM?

But what about Open Office? Well, nobody uses it at work. At least not yet. I'm guessing the developer contest is hoping to help change that.

I'd like to too.

And $750 is half a month's payment on a yacht.

Getting the bugs out (of PDF)

On a contract I am working at, some joker thought it would be funny to give me a list of defects for the project as a PDF file. Actually, they didn't give it to me. It was zipped up in a deployment release bundle, in a zipped up in a folder called "Limitations."

I'm actually lucky to have found it at all. So I suppose I should be happy to have it.

I bet their PDF export script (using XSL:FO, no doubt) is the pride and joy of the consulting firm who used it to output their bugs (note: there is a bug in the output for 'Assign To') and while PDFs have really nice anti-aliased fonts when printed out, I didn't have access to a printer.

Having to go through a large list of defects in PDF, even if they were printed out, wouldn't have been fun.

In all fairness, it was a nice layout, and would have been easy to read on paper, but I wanted something I could manipulate.

Thankfully, Acrobat Reader isn't what it used to be, meaning you can search it, and also, a feature that was added I don't know when, (recently?) "save as text."

I now had a plaintext document that I could search with a text editor, and even more importantly, read more than eleven and a half lines on a page.

But I still wanted more. So I thought I'd slurp them all up into a quick and dirty database to run some queries on and maybe even eventually output in a format that's somwhere in the happy medium between .pdf and .txt

I thought I'd try using Python for this, since I wanted to brush up on it, and I figured it wouldn't take more than an hour.

I got going quick enough: reading a file, check; connecting to database, check;

But I found quick enough that this was not a nicely structured document. After a bit of regex massaging in my favorite windows text editor, Editplus, I still wasn't getting it.

A few futile searchs and I was reading python newsgroups with people confessing of dipping their toes in the "dark side" for text processing.

This isn't a python bashing post, but I put it away after using up the allotted time, and went on to other things.

***

But at 6:15 this morning I was thinking of a solution, and I didn't know if it was real or just a product of that dream state of mind where everything *seems* to make sense.

So I did what any sensible person would do. I ignored it and tried to go back to sleep. It's *Saturday*.

A few minutes later I switched on the stereo, Scorpions "Best of the Ballads, Hot and Slow", a vintage cassette tape, and was soon "In Trance." Before the end of "Yellow Raven", I had my company laptop on, laying in bed, and I was working in PHP.

At eight o'clock the battery died and I got up and put it away.

How did I get from Python to Perl to PHP?

Well, it started out as a simple enough text parsing task, but I found that because of several special conditions (which I should have just ignored) you really needed an ugly procedural mess with a lot of conditions to put it up right. But you needed an object model to store it all, because it wasn't something that could be done with one pass throught the file.

PHP is good at switching from a glob of spaghetti to a set of functions, to using objects as glorified hashes, and now with PHP5, it's even got a decent, though limited object model.

But what I ended up doing was working on my pet project, an ORM for PHP, only to realize when all was said and done, that what I needed in this instance was an ActiveRecord.

Maybe I should have just used Ruby?

The OTLOTT (One True List of Testing Terms)

I started making a list of Testing terms to help me have a definite vocabulary, and it quickly grew out of hand. I soon realized that what I needed were two lists:

One comprehensive list with all the definitions of all the terms I could find.
&
One definitive list of specific terms for my own use.


This second list would be my own, though I'd draw as much as possible from common usage. I want a specific terminology that can describe what the difference is between a test case and test condition, and what the relationship is between a suite of tests and a set of results.

I see several benefits of this.

Foremost, the act of naming things concentrates your mind on the subject. It allows you to think of something abstractly, and a concrete definition gives you the power to compare it with other abstract things.

This is what I see as the real power of Object Oriented Programming and especially with Design Patterns. The whole idea is to give a name to common patterns to facilitate communication, but even moreso, memory and cognition.

You might have implemented a singleton dozens of times, but until you had a name for it, you had to think about how to solve the particular problem. Once you had a name for it (though you might not have called it a singleton before hearing about GoF), it became obvious that what you needed was a singleton. A little less obvious cognitive test, but one giving even greater power is the ability to decide when you did *not* need a singleton. In fact, you needed a NotSingleton, and eventually this got a name too, perhaps it was a Factory.

And so on until you had a list of patterns with names that helped you remember programming techniques, and definitions that helped you to know when to use (or not use) them, and when to refine your dictionary by adding more terms for things that are definitely *not* whatever.

Even better, if others share your list of names and definitions, you are better able to communicate with each other, and especially, be able to further refine and grow your dictionary.

Which brings me to the first list, the comprehensive one.

Every tester dreams of having the One True List of Test Terms, but it just isn't going to happen. But just the act of making the list is, as I said, a cognitive act with it's own benefits, even if it doesn't result in a general consensus.

It wasn't long before I realized a wiki would be perfect for this, and so I launched one up and started adding terms (as soon as I recovered my password.) As the list grew, I realized that of course, I don't know all the terms, and I know multiple definitions for many, and there are even many terms that I do know that I probably won't think to add to the list.

So I decided it would sure be nice to have some help. And hey! isn't that what wikis are for? So I started one here:

http://wiki.klamathsystems.com/doku.php?id=test-_terms

I'm sure the url will change eventually, but it's a start.*

If you see something that contradicts your own definition, I'd rather see two definitions. We can work on refining the list later and hopefully come to a consensus. Maybe a ranking system to determine preferred usage. And maybe individuals could mark preferred definitions so that they could have there own OTLOTT. I don't know of any existing wiki that has these features, but that doesn't worry me. If the value is there, I'm sure it could be added.


* (On a side note, does anyone know how to get nice URLs in dokuwiki? I'll probably crunch a mod_rewrite script myself if nothing else. I'd also like to have a heirarchy, though wikis aren't supposed to be hierarchical. Something like: http://example.com/wiki/test_resources/terms/foo... I'm not opposed to question marks, but I want all the info to be in the URL. And it seems a shame to implement a local search engine when you could google a site.) **

** Footnotes on a webpage, isn't that what hyperlinks are for? I want a blog that can do hyperlink footnotes.

First post after the disaster

So I set up a blog here to take notes on the open source software I use, as well as the testing methodologies, hoping eventually to combine the two into something that might be usable, hopefully to make my job easier, but something happened (probably my fault) and to make a long story short (not to mention making the blog shorter), I deleted the whole thing and started over.

So this is my first post after the disaster. But it's not much of a disaster. Ernest Hemingway lost his early papers, and the world is probably better for it. "My Old Man" wasn't a masterpiece, no matter what they say. "Big Two-Hearted River" on the other hand, was.