9 GitHub Lists for Testing
I spend a lot of time on GitHub and it can be a great place for finding open source libraries, tools, frameworks and pretty much anything else you might want to version control. This includes lists (and more often than not, lists of lists). The challenge is finding just those lists that contain value and not chasing around each individual list of list in a recursive never ending search.
Why Lists?
Over time and when looking for certain types of failures (or bugs), patterns emerge. Some of these patterns can be captured as data, like password dictionaries or image catalogs, or as a collection of test ideas. Some authors have made lists this with heuristics (Bach, Bolton & Hendrickson) while others have published lists of failures common to certain applications or languages (Kaner).
Here are 9 lists I’ve found to be good references when testing.
Input Fields:
Useful for boundary analysis and equivalence class partitioning, input field catalogs are basically collections of values you can use to try to trigger failures based on the data-type of the input field. For this reason they are often broken into specific data types like Strings, Integers, Floating Points, etc.
- Max Woolf’s list of Big Naughty Strings.
- John Gracey’s list of delightful Unicode tidbits, packages and resources.
- My own set of Input Field Catalogs which currently only lists Integers but hopefully expand on that.
Security:
For both tools and reference material, turns out there are some good references for learning more about security. Password libraries and other data:
More:
Other valuable lists that don’t easily fall into a single category:
- My own catalog of images. Based on size and format you can use this catalog for testing image uploads. Searching Google I wasn’t able to find any specific collection for testing, so I made my own.
- Awesome Test Automation. A curated list of test automation frameworks, tools, libraries, etc. The list is pretty good. I use Ruby and they had a good list of Ruby gems for generating test data.
- TestingConferences.org. A simple list of software testing conferences and workshops published collaboratively with the testing community.
- Free Software Testing Books. That’s right, a collection of free software testing books. Although some of these appear to be papers, guides and “demo” chapters, it’s still a good (cough, free) reference!
Did I miss any lists that you find useful for testing? If so leave a comment and tell me what you like about the particular list!