Apologies to all RSS users, the feed has been down for several weeks so you may get a whole bunch of news items appearing today. The feed populates dynamically and I inadvertently changed the database connection file recently but missed the RSS feed out of my test process. D'oh!

STAF (SW Test Automation Framework) V3.3.1 and STAX V3.3.4 are now available. In addition, new versions of the HTTP, Event, Email, Cron, and EventManager services are now available. You can find more information and download the binaries from the official STAF web site. There are some new features in STAF V3.3.1 and STAX 3.3.4 as well as bug fixes and documentation updates, and some new usability

JSystem have new community site using the Trac platform. You can view and add tickets, view the road map, view changes as timeline, view the project dashboard and more.

Marathon runs gui based acceptance tests against Java/Swing applications. This is the second public release of Marathon 2.0. This release supports script recording and playback in python 2.5 and ruby 1.8 as well as the Marathon 1.0 supported python 2.2.1. Marathon 2.0 also has an integrated debugger with support for breakpoints and stepping through the test scripts.

New features integrated in this release include: *new-751: LDAP // Multiple Base DN support. *new-752: [SF2162856] Add file attachments when creating a new record. Bug fixes integrated in this release include: *bug-753: XML failure on some search results.

If your code manipulates floating-point values, your tests will probably involve floating-point values as well.

When comparing floating-point values, checking for equality might lead to unexpected results. Rounding errors can lead to a result that is close to the expected one, but not equal. As a consequence, an assertion might fail when checking for equality of two floating-point quantities even if the program is implemented correctly.

The Google C++ Testing Framework provides functions for comparing two floating-point quantities up to a given precision.

In C++, you can use the following macros:

ASSERT_FLOAT_EQ(expected, actual);
ASSERT_DOUBLE_EQ(expected, actual);
EXPECT_FLOAT_EQ(expected, actual);
EXPECT_DOUBLE_EQ(expected, actual);

Sauce Labs is a cloud-based Selenium service that runs test scripts concurrently. It delivers radically faster test suite completion times and removes the hassle of setting up your own Selenium test machines. User transition to (or from) our service is typically as easy as putting some API calls into a build script or cron job. Generic Selenium in, standard Selenium results out. Just screaming fas

By Roshan Sembacuttiaratchy, Software Engineer in Test, Google Zurich, Switzerland

When I tell people that I'm a Test Engineer at Google, I get a confused look from them and questions as to what I actually do. Do I sit in front of a keyboard clicking every button and link on screen? Do I watch over the infinite number of monkeys, checking to make sure they produce Shakespeare's work while clicking said links? Or do we create better and smarter pigeons? Well, it's actually a bit of everything, but not quite in the way you might think at first.