Test Patterns out of control

 In my blog entry Apostrophe, Ampersand, Exclamation mark & Co. early this year, I highlighted how important the use of special characters has become for our team during testing. A closer look at the article demonstrates that these characters aren't really exceptionnel in real life. They are commonly used; actually more common than what most of us initially thought. It's therefore even more important, we don't treat these letters as a special cases used by testers only.

I smirked when I recently noticed how many fake persons were added into our reference test data containing German umlauts or apostrophes, etc. Looks like a lot of testers are crazy to find maniac but still realistic data. It has become much harder to find vanilla data. Mission accomplished.