Test Case Manager Lite

Do you develop and test software...if so you may often run into these questions...

1. Are we ready to ship?
2. How much longer will it take to test?
3. If we release now, what is our exposure (lack of test coverage)?
4. Are we systematically regression testing existing functionality, or adhoc testing differently each time?
5. Are we capturing every bug in a test case to prevent recurrence?
6. How is our quality trending from test cycle to test cycle?
7. Do we have proven written test cases on which to start automating?

Just released TCMLite as a free, simple, highly configurable test case management tool enabling you to better answer these questions. Use TCMLite to design, write, and execute your test cases. Your entire test team can concurrently access the same test case repository (XLS file) using Excel's "shared workbooks" feature (Help section 1.4).

Best of the Best Software Testing Articles

Here are some of the best testing articles I've come across over the years...

• How Do You Know When You Are Done Testing? article
• James Bach's Test Automation Snake Oil article
• IBM 28 best Practices for software testing
• Brian Marick's Classic Testing Mistakes article
• Brian Marick's Failure Improvement...how to refine a bug article
• James Bach's What is Exploratory Testing? article
• Wikipedia for a great overview of Software Testing

How do I quickly get record counts for all MSSQL tables?

Frequently when testing, you will need a quick way to get record counts for all tables in a given database. For example, you can take before and after snapshots of all tables' record counts to quickly ensure the proper work was done on the right tables.

The following two-line SQL statement will automatically generate a much larger, custom-built SQL script that can be copied and executed to fetch counts for all tables in the target database.

How do I quickly get MSSQL table sizes?

Frequently when testing, you will need a quick way to get the size (in kilobytes) for all tables in a given database. For example, you can take before and after snapshots of all tables' sizes to quickly ensure the proper work was done on the right tables.

How do I flush the MSSQL cache for performance testing?

When performance tuning, you often follow a cycle of changing the tSQL, running it in query analyzer, jotting down the new execution time...and repeating the cycle again and again to reduce the time.

Because MSSQL caches results, your performance timings can be inaccurate. For example, the first run does the work and takes say 35 seconds. All subsequent runs might take 1 second or less because they are not doing any work. The subsequent runs are simply fetching the previously cached results.

Free Tool for Comparing MSSQL Databases

There is frequently a need to compare two databases when developing or testing a data-driven application.

You'll want answers to questions:

• Did a table change?
• Did some fields get added, deleted, renamed, or have a type change?
• Did views or triggers or indexes get modified or added?
• Did source code inside a stored procedure change?
• Is the testing schema different from the development schema?
• Have there been any changes in the development schema since last week?

Oops, I've Been Breaking Many .NET Coding Standards!

Back in the classic VB3-6/VBA days, I heavily used hungarian notation as it was the naming convention standard. Assumed I should continue following the same standard when naming my objects in .NET. Found out this is wrong and that I've been violating several .NET / C# best practices.

Wait! Don't throw out that old computer that won't boot

The fix can be as simple as a $4 CMOS (watch) battery.

My evening backups failed two nights ago. A ping didn't respond. When I hooked up a monitor, the Windows logo was frozen onscreen.

Okay, no problem, BSOD's or freezes can happen on old hardware running windows. Reboot should do the trick.