Counterstrings

TLDR; Generate CounterStrings, random data from Regex, ranges of data, and strings made by concatenating repeated data.

What would be suitable Code Katas for people wanting to learn how to code to support their testing?

Writing a Chrome Extension is pretty easy (getting it in the Chrome Store is much harder!). In this post I will take the snippet code I wrote to generate CounterStrings and convert it into a Chrome Extension.

CounterStrings are an underused technique. Primarily because there are not a lot of tools that implement it. In this blog post I explain how you can use them from within your browser, and as a bonus, using them to find a bug in Github.

I often talk about automating tactically and strategically. When we automate tactically we do what it takes to get the job done for us. When we automate strategically we build for the long term.

The same is true for programming tools. We can start small and tactical and scale strategically. In this example I create a Counterstring tool.

TLDR; Reverse counterstrings are easier to generate. Creating same output forward is harder but might be useful for streaming or files.