Random testing or fuzzy testing is nothing new, but for those of you who are new to it I just wanted to share a little tool I found. If you want to know a bit more about fuzzy testing go read at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing or whatever place you like to find quick info at.

Barton Miller has written a bit about this and made some binaries to use at:

ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/fuzz/

Read ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-nt.pdf for interesting MS Windows results.

The binary subjects an application to a stream of random input either by keyboard and mouse events or by using SendMessage and PostMessage. I used the binary on WinXP on UltraEdit and MS Word. I even tested the feature to simulate mouse click and mouse movement with a few interesting results.

What does this tell me? What would I expect from this? Is this a tool that I want to have in my tool box when testing software?

Using this tool will help you check robustness of an application. It will do automated random testing. If an application crashes often it might be that they have not properly handled Win32 messages. I will try this out in my toolbox. Even if you decide not to use it, read Bartons article.