Thursday, April 26, 2012

The Ten Minute Test Plan

Great idea from James Whittaker, Test Director at Google. Inspiring read, want to see if we can put this to good use:
http://goo.gl/Tocgs

SQA: The Oracle Problem

Testing involves examining the behaviour of a system in order to discover potential faults.

The problem of determining the desired correct behaviour for a given input is called the Oracle Problem. 

Since manual testing is expensive and time consuming there has been a great deal of work on automation and part automation of Software Testing. However, the problem of automating the Oracle remains a bottleneck that inhibits progress in increased automation for test effectiveness and efficiency.


source

Friday, April 6, 2012

structured, semistructured, unstructured data


Structured data is data that is organized into entities that have a defined format, such as XML documents or database tables that conform to a particular predefined schema. This is the realm of the RDBMS.

Semi-structured data, on the other hand, is looser, and though there may be a schema, it is often ignored, so it may be used only as a guide to the structure of the data: for example, a spreadsheet, in which the structure is the grid of cells, although the cells themselves may hold any form of data.

Unstructured data does not have any particular internal structure: for example, plain text or image data.

Source:  Hadoop: The Definitive Guide