I found Trish Koo’s blog on how to automate the input of test data while doing exploratory testing enlightening. A lot of the blog/twitter chatter recently has been about test automation and specifically doing too much automating, at least on the GUI level. As a new tester, I sometimes have to remind myself that some things don’t need to be automated. That being said, anything that can help relieve the pain of manual testing is always helpful. I don’t know about how you do quick exploratory testing, but any time I come across a text field, odds are I’m going to fill it with some variation of “test”. While I found her solution helpful, having to use a keyboard shortcut to copy data to my clipboard, then use another to paste the data, is too much work for me. For the past couple of months, I have been playing with TextExpander and I thought I could add a snippet to input test data. I started by finding some test data and putting it in a .txt file, one item per line. From there, riffing on Trish’s code, I added the following snippet:

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     #!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU

      dict = File.open('/<PathToYourFile>/File.txt')
      lines = dict.readlines
      word = lines[rand(lines.size)]
      puts word
  

I’ve found this solution helps speed up my manual testing in addition to adding more realistic data to the database.