Exploring the craft of Software Testing



It’s been a while since i wrote any thing new on my blog. I would like to thank all the readers of my blog for keeping this live as of today. There were no posts for the last two years and still attracts good number of visitors. I have another blog called Tech Bytes and this just contains my reading list over technology and tools. The Tech Bytes now merged into this blog and will be keep the efforts only here. I have recently came to know that this blog has been listed in the MSDN Tester Center Community Blogs. It’s a great feeling to get listed there.

I am back to blogging and will be sharing my views regularly.I will be focusing on the craft of software testing, quality and development. Lot many things happened over the past two years. Quality is the buzz word now every where.

Trends in Static Analysis Tools and Code Quality Metrics


Interesting trends are happening around Static Analysis and Code Quality. The tools vendors closely looking at each of the code quality metrics and merging them to have a better metric. We can see the pattern from Agitar by coming up with CRAP4J. Here is one more vendor coming up with the tools on Code Quality and Static Analysis.

The AppPerfect comes with a suite of products around code quality metrics and improvements. DevTest4J is a suite of products designed to help you build and test high-performance applications during the development phase of the product life-cycle.

CRAP4J for Java Code Quality


I have been talking about Code Quality through Static Analysis for a while here, here & here. The quality for any application development must begin from it’s gross roots and the Application Code is one of it’s starting point to begin with.Static Analysis techniques help us to identify some metrics over the application code base

  • Cyclomatic Complexity
  • Application Design & Dependency Metrics
  • Exception Handling
  • Infinite Loops
  • Dead Code
  • Performance Issues
  • Programming Language guidelines & best practices in their context

The above information will be useful and it’s easy to get the same via Test Framework with a single click.

Code Coverage along with a bunch of unit tests is one widely used technique to help regression testing for the dev & test teams.

Now it’s good to see that Agitar combines Code Coverage & Cyclomatic Complexity to derive risk metrics for Java Code Base. They call it as a code Change Risk Analyzer and Predictor (i.e. CRAP) for Java.

Though it’s a prototype and see how the industry receives the same, i see it as a good initiative on the code quality front and might be a metric going forward for white box testing.

Some useful links for CRAP4J

Update on Oct 23rd

Now we have a dedicated site for CRAP4J. This contains latest news, forum discussions and many more. I would say that this a good resource for Code Quality lovers & the good news is that they are designed to be open source tools.

Crap4j is a Java implementation of the CRAP (Change Risk Analysis and Predictions) software metric – a mildly offensive metric name to help protect you from truly offensive code.

The CRAP metric combines cyclomatic complexity and code coverage from automated tests (e.g. JUnit tests) to help you identify code that might be particularly difficult to understand, test, or maintain – the kind of code that makes developers say: “This is crap!” or, if they are stuck maintaining it, “Oh, crap!”.

The best way to learn more about CRAP and Crap4j is to check the various articles, newsgroups and blogs about them.

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What Jar – Solution to NoClassDefFoundError


As a Tester & Developer, it’s pretty common to see NoClassDefFoundError. It’s not that easy always to figureout the required jars for the application.

Whatjar comes with a lot of search capabilities to identify and download the required jars.

Whatjar is a high-performance, search engine written using Java and MySQL to index and search Java JAR contents. Its primary goal is to provide a tool to help the developer find the JAR file required when faced with a class not found exception. In addtion to act as searchable resource of open source java jars.

Whatjar is free, there is no cost to upload a jar or to search our existing database of JARS.


Yet Another Blog on Software Testing


Welcome to my world of software of testing online. I will be sharing my views, thoughts on various topics of Software Testing, Development, Quality, Software Metrics, Tools  and various other topics also. I will use this blog as a knowledge base for my ideas, reading & arguments on the topics. In the process, i will be sharing some interesting links, tools, articles and any other info that might be value addition to me. It may so happen that the information on blog might be useful to the people of software testing community.


This is Venkat Reddy Chintalapdi (Venkat in short) working with YASU Technologies as Test Manager. I have over 7 years of experience in the Industry worked on Development, Testing, Maintenance and Technical Support. All these years of experience made me good at understanding the applications and how to validate the same.

I am excited to test the applications and discover it’s behavior in many scenarios. These tests helped me to improve my thought process and i feel that it’s a creative skill. Testing is not at all a dumb skill and these testers need to have more skills than the one who developed the same. These skills will spread over your Domain, Technology and how the systems behave in genaral.

I will be sharing my views and the experiences here. I am inspired by James Bach and Cem Kaner.

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