A test guy

Karen Johnson has a cool post about numbers she likes to use when testing. I’ve found bugs with “017″ (octal), “0×11″ (hex), and “999″.

As a tester, I’ve always had a few data visualization tools in my toolbox. I’ve mostly used Microsoft Excel regular and pivot charts, and gnuplot. Now I’ve found a nice plotting program for my mac when I have some raw data I’d like to see in a chart.

I’ve been playing with Plot to display a chart of weights for our CCI puppies. I like it over gnuplot 4.0 + aquaterm because I figured out how to change line colors for each column of data, and it’s easier to zoom. Here’s the sample output (click on image to view full-size):

and the zoomed view:

I use a short script of Plot macrto commands to import the data from a flat text file and set the color options.

From the “picture is worth a thousand words” school . . .

I created two screencasts to demonstrate how I updated the SHAPE forum while I was guest-moderator. I thought they might be useful to the next moderator, and I’ve wanted to try my hand at creating screencasts.

Here’s what I used on my mac:

• iShowU
• MenuShade to dim the menubar
• Mousepose’ to highlight the mouse position
• Backdrop to cover the background
• USB Headset with noise-canceling microphone

I did a little bit of planning, rehearsal of some of the trickier bits, and I think the screencasts came out generally ok. I also think I’ll get better at them the more I do them.

But I’m much better at doing tasks like this if I have a real-world problem to solve.

So, does anyone want a particular screencast from me?