GS Design Just another developer blog

If you are a developer than you are well aware of the importance of testing your applications, and i dont mean testing it your self since that is really not going to be very helpful beyond the development stage.

Since you ( or your team ) have build this application you will not be tester, since you already know how the application will perform. The best thing to do is to do a test with more subjects, of all knowledge levels if possible and give them a series of events and tasks to perform to see how the application handles and how easy it is for them to perform those tasks.

I found that in all test groups there is always a “bird brain” (as the speaker in the presentation reffered to it) that will execute a series of actions that will crash your application (usually things you havent thought of anybody doing). Although some developers hate those type of testers ( how the F did you managed to get there) i like them. At my old job i used to have a secretary that would find any bug i might have overlooked in a matter of minutes, just by clicking around ).

Anyway, the point i was trying to make ( beside the fact that testing is important ) is that human driven tests although very creative at times, have a few limitations and will not managed to test the full amount of possibilities. And above this will take quite a few resources ( human and financially ) to execute this tests, and they cant be reused if the application changes.

So there are some really smart persons that are looking into making an automated system for testing web applications. Some the research in this field are also done by microsoft ( this is a small inside info for all those microsoft haters ).

I am not going to go into much more details and let you watch the presentation.
Enjoy.

I have been using Gmail for a while, and it is a great service. It has 6GB of free space wich is great, and i belive it is one of the fastest web based clients at the moment. But i have to say i am not a big fan and it is not my main account ( wich is a yahoo based account mainly because i use theyr IM more ).One of the reasins why is because i like the 3 side look from Outlook, ThunderBird or Yahoo. It is more fast for me and allows to browse through emails with more ease.

Recently Google went live with Gmail Labs, wich allows you to enable new experimental features for Gmail. To do this you must log into your account and click Settings, and switch to the right-most tab, titled Labs. There you will see a list of features that you can enable with an explination for all of them.
These features have been developed by the Gmail staff in order to improve your Gmail experience. For now they are experimental and you can test them, and lator on Google will track which features are most popular and introduce them into the Gmail core. This is why along the way you might see some new features appearing in the list, or some features disappearing.

Here is the list of the current features that you can enable:

Quick links box:

This will add a box to the left side to which you can add any Gmail URL… like, for instance, a Gmail search for in:inbox is:unread to see all your unread messages of your inbox. This could come in very handy.

Different stars icons:

Lets you define a couple of different star icons. Traditionally you can only either add or remove a yellow star to a mail. With this feature you can click the star several times to rotate its image. (Google names this feature “Superstars”, which is a bit of a pun that might make some mistake it for a “automated icons for VIP friends” feature at first.)

Fixed width font:

Enabling this will trigger a new entry in the “Reply” menu that lets you switch to a non-proportional font.

A Snakes game:

Well, perhaps something to surprise your friend, though not useful (or a terrific novel game) in itself; enable this, then enable shortcuts, and press “&” to bring up a game of snakes.

Mouse gestures:

When you enable this feature you can hold the right mouse button and then move the mouse upwards to jump to the inbox, from any place. Moving left-ways goes to a previous conversation, moving to the right goes to the next.

Random signature:

This will load one of several signatures available in an RSS feed file.

There more features but i will let you discover them on your own.

I think Google decision is a ground-braking one because it lets the user build the product in a certain why. This brings beta testing to a whole new level.

The sad part for me is that although i had the Google Labs announce for a while in my Gmail Account, they decided to only luch it for US and UK users . So please tell me what do you think of the plugins and how usefull they are since i wont be able to try them for a while it seems.

Cheers

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