>> Perhaps a DevCon session?
>
>Sounds sweet. I'd attend.

It's a go, then. The more I thought about this, the more I realized the dearth of information for professinal level testing. I mean, if you're in the field of professional software testing, the resources are there because you know to seek them out. There's the standard texts (Myer, Kaner, et. al.) We have our own magazine (STQE.com; don't bother to subscribe if you don't test for a living. The website's cool, though.) We even have our own equivalents to DevCon.

(Disclaimer: I will use the word "you" a lot in the following. It is the general "you", and not directed toward you, Evan.) But for Joe Consultant, what have you got? You ain't got Jack. Click here, enter some data there, it didn't blow up, ship it. That isn't a methodology, it's the test equivalent to hacking. But unless you look for them, few resources stand out as good information on how to go through your app to make sure it's solid.

Tell me why testing against hexadecimal boundries is important. Yeah, didn't think so. Ever thought about running large fonts with your app? My eyes aren't getting any better, you know. Oh, you assumed I run the standard Windows color scheme? What about accessibility? Could be that one of your users enters data with a stick attached to their forehead. Is that numeric field large enough? What if it isn't? Is your multithreaded DLL really able to handle multiple users? And then there's the whole automation thing. You do know about automated testing, right? There are entire conferences for that subject.

In an earlier post, I said that I've crashed my microwave and my cell phone. I forgot that I recently crashed my digital camera, too (had to take the battery out and reboot). Give me any of your VFP apps and 60 minutes, and I'll give you at least 15 bug reports. :-) The point is, as I said earlier, is that all software has bugs. The issue is how to most efficiently find them, because you won't find them all, and they're not all worth fixing or stopping you from shipping. I hope to put together a session that explains how to do this.

Blah, blah, blah. I could go on for hours. The trick will be trimming it down to 75 minutes for a session. :-) Maybe I can do it in San Diego, maybe Whil has room at WhilFest, maybe it has to wait until next year. But the next time I'm asked to speak, testing your software will be a topic I'll request to speak on.