[prog] Programming for QA folks

[Cynthia Kiser]

Quoting Anna Baik <annaheyonbaik at gmail.com>:
> Background info: I'm a software tester working for a group who support
> a large "legacy" system in my company.   We'd really like to automate
> some of our regression testing and so we've been looking at learning
> shell scripting - specifically the Korn shell.  I guess Perl is the
> other option.  

You haven't given us a lot if information about what kind of system
this is. Is it command line based? If so, then a scripting language
like shell or Perl or Python seem like a good fit. I would lean toward
a scripting language because they are more self contained and tend to
be a bit more portable. Most Unixy tools are gravitating towards GNU
options but I still run into the frustration of "this verson of grep
doesn't take that option" fairly frequently. If you need to build your
own tools and are learning from scratch, then I would suggest checking
out Python. I found it easier to learn than Perl - though still not
without its own frustrations. And a lot of programmers I really
respect are devoted to Python so I feel good about recommending it
even though I just dabble. 

But what kind of legacy system? I assume it isn't web based or you
would be asking about one of the many web testing frameworks. Have you
looked for a testing framework that is geared to the kind of app this
is? 


-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser
cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu