investigating software

Testing doesn't complete, it might end, it might finish, but it doesn't complete. There's too much to test. If you ever need confirmation of this, test something, something that's been tested already. Better still test a piece of software, you know has been tested by someone you think is a brilliant tester. A good tester like you, will still find new issues, ambiguities and bugs. That's because the complexity of modern software is huge: as well as all the potential code paths of your code, there's all the other underlying code's paths and the near infinite domain of data it might process. Thats part of the beauty of testing, you have to be able to get a handle on this vast test space. That is, review a near infinite test-space in a [very] finite time-frame. We are unable to give a complete picture of the product to our clients. But we are also free to find out new issues, that have so far eluded others. In fact the consequences are potentially more drama

In my last post I discussed how test automation could be used to do things that I couldn't easily do unaided. In that example, execute thousands of news 'content searches' and help me sort through them. With the help of some simple test automation I found some potential issues with the results returned by the REST API. In that case, I started out with the aim of implementing a tool. But your testing might not lead you that way, often your own hands-on investigation can find an issue. But you don't know how widespread it is, is it a one-off curiosity? or a sign of something more widespread.? Again, this is where test automation can help, and if done well, without being an implementation or maintenance burden. Many test automation efforts are blind to the very Agile idea of YAGNI or You Ain't Gonna Need it . They often presume to know all that needs to be tested in advance, deciding to invest most of their time writing 'tests' blindly against a specific

Have you ever had to test an API that's accessible over the internet? or even one thats available internally within your organisation? They often take the form of a REST service (or similar) through which other software can easily access information in a machine readable form. Even if you are not familiar with these APIs, you've probably heard-of or seen the results of them. Some examples of APIs are the Twitter API ,   Flickr  and the Guardian's Open Platform . Some examples of what people have built using the Flickr API are published on the flickr site. Despite being 'machine-readable' they are often human readable, greatly helping you test and debug them. Companies use these APIs to ease the distribution of their content, encourage community and commercial development around their content or to simply provide a clear and documentable line between their role as data-provider and where the consumer's role begins. When testing an API like the above, many