Testing – Page 2 – bish.co.uk

Valid UK address data for testing

Mark Tomlinson (@Mtomlins) recently contacted me via Skype and asked me whether I had source of test data for valid UK addresses and postcodes. In the past I’ve used Brian Dunning’s sample data, and initially I recommended this to Mark. The data appears to be valid, but is actually made up of real first and last names, together with randomised street addresses which do not represent actual locations. This made me wonder what would be a good source of valid addresses for testing.

There are various options available to performance testers, including cuts of production data (suitably anonymised) or the Royal Mail address database. I did a couple of Google searches and stumbled across an excellent site run by Chris Bell, a developer who specialises in .NET, PHP and Google Maps integration.

Random Address Generator – from Chris Bell’s website

Chris has a random address generator on his website, you simply enter the number of addresses you require and decide whether you want them comma separated or not, then click a button to create the addresses. As the addresses are created by are plotted on a Google map which demonstrates that they are valid and once the list is complete, you can download it to a text file on your computer.

Chris has some other great code samples on his site including code which converts postcodes to latitude and longitude (and vice versa), lists UK phone dialling codes geographically and has sources of data such as postcodes by parliamentary constituency and even property sales.

PostCodes by Parliamentary Constituency – from Chris Bell’s website

This is a fantastic source of data for any tester or even somebody who’s just a bit nosey and wants to know how much their neighbour’s house is worth! 😉

Everyone’s a tester

This afternoon, my wife (who is a Dentist) was looking for information on the BDA (British Dental Association) website (www.bda.org) . She called me over when she realised that somebody working on that site didn’t seem to know their own domain name. One of the links to previous articles sent users to www.bda.org.uk (The British Deaf Association).

Doing the responsible thing, she laughed about the problem and sent a bug report (in the form of an email) to the BDA. They’ve promised to fix the problem, so no harm done (apart from some slight reputational damage).

This brings one thing to mind for me….

If you want to avoid this kind of embarrassing incident, you should employ “real testers” to find these sorts of bugs before your customers do.

How much detail to include in a performance test report?

I’m a member of a LinkedIn group called “Performance Testing“. This morning a member of the group from BlazeMeter posted a link to their blog article about how much detail to put into a performance test report.

http://blazemeter.com/blog/what-include-load-test-report-technical-vs-management-reports

Historically I’ve always put large amounts of detail into performance test reports, but over the last 12 months or so I’ve started to reduce the amount of content. This allows me to produce what the customer generally wants in a shorter time frame.

In most performance tests customers tend to want to know the answer to one question:
Will my application perform well under expected user load?

This can generally be answered with “yes” or “no”, although occasionally the answer is “maybe”. (I tend to use traffic lights to show this at a high level.)

Often much more information than this is simply wasting time. In the last year or so I’ve started to produce reports in Powerpoint that can be easily referred to in conference calls or webinars, be presented to clients at their site and can be re-used internally by my client’s project managers when they want to pass on information to their own internal customers.

I have found that by including less high-level detail and including embedded spreadsheets, charts or other documents allowing technical readers to “drill down” to the detail; I can keep all the potential readers of my reports happy.

I’ve attached a PDF “mock up” of a performance test report based on a test that I ran for a client earlier this year. I’d be interested to hear any comments from other testers about what works for them.

Sample Test Report