General Testing

Linguistic testing

Spellers

  • lexical coverage / false negatives
  • error detection / true negatives
  • error slip-through / false positives

Hyphenators

  • missing hyphenation points
  • wrong hyphenation points

Functional testing

  • amount of correct suggestions for all misspellings (=correct suggestion in the list?)
  • position of correct suggestion within suggestion list
  • amount of "noise" / disturbing suggestions
  • amount of empty suggestion lists (wrong spellings without suggestions)

Technical testing

  • crashes
  • speed
  • does it work?
  • installation
  • all host applications (=the whole Office suite, not only Word)

Log output in alpha / beta spellers? Question to both Polderland and Aspell (and other engine providers in the future). This is important to be able to identify appearent crashes or malfunctions.

Internal testing routines

We have a set of tools to run automated tests, with different types of data.

External testing (external beta testers)

Goal

To get as broad a beta testing as possible, with many testers, testers on different platforms, and within different genres and writing habits.

Means

  • create interest (press release from SD)
  • ask everybody at SD, newspapers, schools, language centers to participate
  • easy download, easy installation (installation instructions)
    • Ask testers to register the issues we would like to have feedback on (mostly linguistic and functional testing).
  • keep in touch: info on project home page, e-mail list (beta@divvun.no)
  • getting and giving feedback
    • Make FAQ
    • Every release has a fix list (summary in se, smj, no, details in en)
  • release often (linguistic updates)

Feedback infrastructure

  • e-mail list
  • web form
  • if speller logs, automated e-mailing (with confirmation) of the logs?
  • automatic processing of web form

Web form

Please use Bugzilla to report (create your own account if necessary):

  • missing words
  • wrong suggestions, or the correct one very low on the suggesion list

Please remember to always report the lexicon version number. This is done by typing "nuvviDspeller" (please note the case), and check the suggestions - one should inlude a string similar to:

Davvisámi, public beta 2, 2007-09-03

Select that suggestion (it should replace the text "nuvviDspeller"), and cut and paste the new text into the bug report.