Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Combinatorial / Pairwise Tools

I’ve recommended combinatorial or pairwise tools frequently in my Automation Isn’t Shiny Toys talk. I think it’s a great way to cut down large matrices of input data or configurations. These tools can save you incredible amounts of time – as James Bach mentions on his Allpairs blurb, you can potentially cut 10,000,000,000 test cases down to 177.

Them’s big apples, folks.

Here are a few of the resources I’ve mentioned in that segment of the talk:

  • Pairwise.org. A great starting place to learn about combinatorial or pairwise testing.
  • Allpairs. Nifty Perl script from James Bach.
  • ACTS. Another nice tool from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It’s freely available, but you have to ask.
  • MbUnit. Lovely test framework for the .NET platform which has combinatorial features built in!

I encourage you to do a bit of reading on the subject and see if it might be helpful for you!

Update: I totally forgot to mention Hexawise, an interesting tool/service. I haven’t personally used it, but I’ve read up on it and follow founder Justin Hunter on Twitter. Interesting pricing model, too.

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