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Semi-Smart Monkeys

Dumb monkeys can be extremely effective. They're easy to write and can find serious, crashing bugs. They lack a few important features, though, that would make them even more effective. Adding these features raises your monkey's IQ a bit, making him semi-smart.

Say that your monkey ran for several hours, logging thousands of random inputs before the software crashed. You'd know there was a problem but you couldn't show the programmer exactly how to re-create it. You could rerun your monkey with the same random seed but if it took several hours again to fail, you'd be wasting a lot of time. The solution is to add logging to your monkey so that everything it does is recorded to a file. When the monkey finds a bug, you need only to look at the log file to see what it was doing before the failure.

It's also a good idea to program your monkey to operate only on the software you're testing. If it's randomly clicking all over the screen, it could (and will eventually) click the exit command and stop the program. Since the monkey doesn't know that the program closed, it'll keep on going. Think about what would happen if the monkey was clicking all over your computer's screen—ouch! Most programmable automation tools provide a way to always target a specific application, or to stop working if the application is no longer present.

Another good feature to make your monkey semi-smart is crash recognition. If you started your monkey running for the night and it found a bug as soon as you walked out the door, you'd lose many hours of valuable test time. If you can add programming to your monkey to recognize that a crash has occurred, restart the computer, and start running again, you could potentially find several bugs each night.

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Last Update: November 17, 2020