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PICT rules! (and so does 80:20!)

Submitted by Erik Petersen on Tue, 12/05/2009 - 14:20.

I finally got to do some serious combinatorial test design using PICT (download it here ) defining a series of rules covering a multi-stage approval workflow over a group of input queues. What could have taken several thousand tests reduced to under 40 after some experimentation to define the rules, and after several tweaking runs to optimize the mix of tests (including a seed file to get a successful case for each input queue), there were 2 tests for each of the core queues, and one for each of the others, as well as a mix of failure situations. It is an amazing tool that I want to keep investigating further. Thank you Jacek for your work on PICT!

Meanwhile, my Building Software Smarter Google TechTalk has clocked up fourteen thousand views in seven months, which is far beyond what I ever expected. I hope people are adopting the ideas in the talk. If you want to test even smarter, why not use PICT as well!

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PICT Gui Wrapper

Submitted by Antony Marcano on Fri, 15/05/2009 - 11:03.

Hi Erik,

In case you've not heard of it, there is a tool called Test Case Generator (TCG).

I've not used it but was aware of it. It has it's own combinatorial generation algorithms but also uses PICT for n-wise combination generation.

See the TCG Documentation (PDF) for an idea of what it does and for some screenshots.

Antony Marcano

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