Another session was this Saturday, actually sessions (+WT and WTA). Its very good considering there were basically 6h for those willingly to join.

Even that I proposed the mission and got to play a little before the actual meeting, I think I got more knowledge about boundary testing and limits.

Everything will differ for a product and environment, but in this context I saw:

-a chat message goes through many locations. As we assumed (read the transcript) it will be probably be an Xml record at one point, then maybe a db record. Depending how the data stream is sent, we will probably have another set of limits.

-in testing limits we can actually do (without even trying)  security testing or Pen testing. So we should be also careful from the legal points of view.

-the boundary depends on the input. An alpha numeric char differs from another char. An example used were kanji (Japanese) chars (“Petteri Lyytinen: I tried to paste a text string that is 32768 kanji characters” ..”only showed the two dots”)

-anything too big is truncated (or should be truncated in some situations) and the process of truncation can be different in some cases, some unexpected

-some parts cannot be tested easily (or in the required time interval) like the history containing large messages

-tools help – this time we used one available, but in other cases tools need to be built up

Thanks to the participants:

Anna Baik, Ben Simo, David Vydra, Kristjan Uba, Lalitkumar Bhamare, Michael Larsen, Narasimha Reddy, Nitin Purswani, Petteri Lyytinen, Santhosh S Tuppad and Eusebiu Blindu (as host)

I participated in EWT34 to check the possibility to use a session based testing tool.

A work of a tester needs to be reported and measured and for this you need something. If the company doesn’t care or opts for quick easy solutions, like measuring test cases and test scripts, things are wrapped up (actually is more like hidden and work is faked) just to be something there.

If you need to find real problems and twist the software and use temporary scripts, spend time on configurations, work on multiple machines you need something for visibility.

One quick solution is a simple doc to be filled, but its not a nice solution if you need to measure time, split in areas or threads, put bugs in some locations, screen-shots and different types of notes are needed. So helpful would be a tool for this.

That’s why I looked at the tool presented in the session, http://testing.gershon.info/reporter/ . It had some issues and I couldn’t get very familiar with it in a short time. But the real problem is that I need something cross-platform and this tool was for Microsoft products only.

So what I want to look for and find, maybe try to design something myself and improve on the way, is something cross platform.

As a though I would consider building it as Firefox plugin, since its cross platform, many people use it and in the worst case you just need to install the browser (and the plugin of course for it).