I was talking to my team today about doing globalization testing as a part of normal tests in our UI. In this conversation we were discussing ways of generating random strings using different unicode chars. I mentioned that there was a Microsoft created library for use in many different areas of testing, one of which is for string generation. However not many testers, even in Microsoft, know about or use this handy library. I’d previously used the string generation portion to do some fuzz testing in a different project, because it was much easier to use than most fuzz tools normally suggested for this purpose.

I decided it might be a good idea to disseminate this information so that it gets more use amongst our test warriors. The following is the basic information to get you started.

Here is the info on the TestApi library that Microsoft made and has many different uses:

§ Overview of TestApi

§ Part 1: Input Injection APIs

§ Part 2: Command-Line Parsing APIs

§ Part 3: Visual Verification APIs

§ Part 4: Combinatorial Variation Generation APIs

§ Part 5: Managed Code Fault Injection APIs

§ Part 6: Text String Generation APIs

§ Part 7: Memory Leak Detection APIs

§ Part 8: Object Comparison APIs

Here is an example from the String generation section that allows you to generate random strings for testing.

  //
  // Generate a Cyrillic string with a length between 10 and 30 characters.
  //

  StringProperties properties = new StringProperties();
  properties.MinNumberOfCodePoints = 10;
  properties.MaxNumberOfCodePoints = 30;
  properties.UnicodeRanges.Add(new UnicodeRange(UnicodeChart.Cyrillic));

  string s = StringFactory.GenerateRandomString(properties, 1234);

  The generated string may look as follows:
  s: Ӥёӱіӱӎ҄ҤяѪӝӱѶҾүҕГ

Enjoy!

Filed under: Coding Tips, Testing Tools | Tagged: Combinatorial testing, Command-Line Parsing, fault injection, globalization testing, Input Injection, memory leak detection, Pair-wise Testing, TestApi | 1 Comment »