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.

Although i have a major in engineering and it is sead that engeeners are organized people,  i guess i dont follow that rule since i am quite disorganized and i have to use varius tools to keep me organized and not forget meetings and deadlines.

Until now i have been using google calendar and am really happy with it. But recently i found a new service that i think took online calendars to a whole new level. It is called Tungle.

It enables you yo quickly and easily share availabilities with other people no matter what calendar software do they use. So to schedule a meeting you can select a time frame ( for example monday from 2 pm to 6pm ) and they can chose one in that time frame. This works also if you have to invite multiple persons. Responses can be made online (either from the computer browser or a smart phone) really easy, no registration nedded from the person you invite.

Also if you book an invitation in that time-frame, it will be updated automaticly so no more double booking.

Also it can import calenders from iCal, Google Calendar or even Outlook. And if your not convinced … here’s another reason … its FREE

I really like this service, and think this is a gold mine for sales persons, executives and anybody that schedules a lot of meetings.
If you want to understand better how it works you can checkout the demo video below.

cheers.