QA & Dyslexia

I’ve got some BlackBerry posts coming up, but first I’d like to say a few words about why I haven’t posted anything in six months.  There are two reasons:

1. I don’t like Windows OS.  I’ll use it if I have to, but for my dev environment at home, I was just too tempted to clean the hard drive (once I’d finished my BlackBerry book), and replace the OS with Linux.  Naturally, I told myself I’d set my BlackBerry dev environment back up on some other machine or in a virtual machine or something, and — since I love installing Windows so much — you can imagine that that task hasn’t come to the top of my “to do” list.
2. I’m excited about my current job, and it’s something completely different: QA engineering for Dybuster.

Dybuster is a software suite that helps dyslexic kids learn to read.  For the kids it’s a game.  It works by giving the kids additional ways to learn words, using colors, tones, and 3D graphical representations:

Since I’ve been testing it, I can say that it has definitely improved my spelling in German.  Of course I’m not Dyslexic. 😉

And, fortunately, there’s an English version available too (including a free downloadable demo version).

A basic QTestLib and qExec example (for engineers with experience in Q.A., not Qt!)

When doing a software QA project, you have to be ready to set up and design tests in a variety of different programming (and scripting) languages — to best integrate the automated tests with the rest of the project.  I’ve worked in C/C++, but I’m far from being an expert on the subject. So I can end up wasting time on points that would be extremely simple for an engineer who works in C or C++ every day. And since I wasted my time on this, I’m posting my notes so that you won’t have to do the same.

I recently added some tests to the automated build of a C++ project that uses Qt, which has a built-in unit testing framework: QTestLib. QTestLib seems reasonably well-designed in terms of features. There were just a couple of points I felt were missing from the tutorial, so I’m posting a few remarks for the sake of Q.A. engineers who need to dive straight into the Qt unit test framework. (Apologies in advance to C/C++ developers who will undoubtedly find these points laughably trivial…)

I’m assuming here that you’ve already done at least the first chapter of the tutorial.  If not, go do it now — it’s very short.

Done? OK, let’s get started. My #1 problem with the tutorial is that it explains how to create a stand-alone application that runs a single QTest class, but doesn’t explain how to create an application that will use QExec to run a series of QTest test suites. Like so many things in software engineering, it’s very simple (once you know the trick).  And today I’m going to tell you the trick!