By Michael Schwern (‎Schwern‎) from PDX.pm
Date: Tuesday June 17, 2008 14:50
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Tags: database testing

How do you test something that needs a big pile of data to run? One way is to load a big pile of testing data for all your tests, but this is brittle and might not cover "interesting" cases.

I'll show you a better way to build up test data using a technique analogous to "The Sims"... virtual people you order around and torture. It can quickly produce testing data specific to your test but interesting enough to exercise your code in unexpected ways.