RoboCrush.com

Great news about test data automation. Looks like the programmers have pulled off yet another amazing feat and have been able to automated nearly 70% of the test data generation we need for this round of testing. That should free up a significant amount of time and save a signicant amount of hair!

We know a lot of you have been frustrated with the complexity of generating some of the test data and learning how to do it, but we’re learning from your feedback and it’s important for all of us to know that even this is an iterative process and it will get easier.

Thanks for hanging in there!

Tad & P.J.

Again, apologies for the delay on this update.

First of all lets semi-quash some rumors that have been flying around about us bringing on consultants to help with the test planning. We say “semi-quash” because the rumor is partially true.  We’ve been talking to a couple companies about our testing rollout, but it’s not as involved as a lot of people have intimated it is.

Mainly the companies that we’ve been talking to just do a basic analysis of test plans that we’re developing and write reports up about any structural defects at the very HIGHEST level of the testing plans. So one thing about that is…any criticisms or suggestions for improvements would NOT reflect on any of the work that the beta testers themselves are doing. It would reflect more on the guidance and instructions that we at RoboCrush are giving to the beta testers.

Hopefully that puts that to bed…at least until the next consultancy rumor comes along. LOL. We’ve been in the biz long enough to know that those will pop up from time to time and honestly at some point it probably will make sense to bring on some short to medium term consultants.

Last weeks testing cycles with prepared data went well and this week we’ll be going more into how to create test data on your own by using some of our test-data prep programs and also using some of the utilities available to write quick scripts for creating test data.

Apologies for the lack of updates over the past couple days. We’ll be  doing a longer weekly wrapup to cover anything we didn’t get to over the past two days.

As expected we’ve become busier and have to do some regrouping and reorganizing to handle the new challenges that’s brought on.

As we mentioned - The upcoming week will be mostly about going through the basic testing cycle we use at RoboCrush and for the most part we will have already prepared sample data for you to use.

However, anyone who’s done extensive testing knows that one of the most frustrating parts of testing can be finding or creating good test data to fullfill testing scenario requirements.

Because at RoboCrush we believe in optimizing procedures by avoiding as many future problems as we can predict (obviously no company can avoid ALL problems) we are going to be spending the bulk of the following week (after we do a week of basic test cycles this week) training you on how to find - and when necessary - create test data.

We are also building in some automated and semi-automated testing procedures to facilitate the entire testing process.  A lot of the testing we need done cannot be automated as I’m sure many of  you who are more experienced testers realize just based on the nature of what we’re doing here.