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Very nice! Thanks so much for that. Now the next step is for you to just write the script for us as a generator or such to populate things on demand. I guess the “lazy” mantra is sinking in… ;) Super!

What good timing! Only this week we have been discussing anonymous / unidentifiable personal data for testing our systems.

Guess our life just got a whole lot easier!

Let hear it for the “Lazy Tester”!

@nicko: Heck, let’s be really lazy, and ask them to just give us an SQL dump or a text file with a few thousand contacts pre-generated. All we need to do is import. :-)

OK, some relevant but blatant self-promotion: a few months ago I wrote lokobot company name generator. A mantra is provided for each company (an advantage over the above options).

Those are interesting ideas; I especially like the source for job titles. I’ll have to remember that next time we need to do something similar.

For contact info, I’ve found it more straightforward to use the Fake Name Generator. It gives a full contact profile (name, address, birthday, mother’s maiden name, phone number, credit card number, SSN ). They can also give you a big table with up to 20,000 random identities (and it’s free).

For random job titles, you could have gone to any goverment agencies job site. They have a host of meaningless names: Business Analyst I, Business Analyst II, Busines Analyst III , ....

Here I thought you meant that you were going to have Highrise randomly introduce people to eachother, I thought that would be pretty cool ;o)

I absolutely love it when I see teams go through such great lengths to make sure their systems are operating with real (simulated) data and to determine if the software does what it is supposed to be doing – helping you solve a real problem.

This is taking acceptance testing to the max, and I commend you guys for it. If this practise becomes as widespread as Rails is, then there is a glorious feature for web applications and an even more glorious future for it customers!

I have a script that pulls militant colonial-era Puritans names and pictures off wikipedia for my testing harness. It’s the bee’s knees and cat’s pajamas together with a side of garlic fries.

That Random Name Generator is almost as fun as my Spam Name Generator, but far, far more useful.

I briefly worked at Microsoft, and they actually have a set list of names which are the only names allowed in sample screenshots. They are all names of current or former employees who gave consent to use their names – thus invalidating any possible claims that someones’ name was used without permission. I doubt anyone would try to sue 37signals for using their name in a screenshot, but Microsoft has to worry about that kind of stuff…

Ahh, Cristal Butt , I knew her well…

I’m instructing my lawyer to sue your butts off as we speak.

What a great timing. I will need fake names next week. Thanks guys.

I love the ‘Laborer Slaughter’ job title for some reason.

For those of you that have had a big wedding, your invite list works great as well. Switch up first/last names and street addresses/cities.

This reminds me of picking your porn/sripper name. First Pets name + your Mothers Maiden name.

Mine is: Ginger Weade…not very sexy.

We have a lot of processes that do address correction, and it’s awfully hard to make up valid addresses during testing. Our solution: gas stations. Hard to find a ZIP code that doesn’t have a gas station in it.

Hello! I’m Vietnamese. Did you toured whatever times? If not already please visit our country with Vietnam travel, Vietnam tours or Vietnam hotels

For testing purposes one should not forget to add some contacts whose names cannot be spelled using standard ASCII . Wikipedia is a great source for such names (look at the unicode pages ;-) ).

This reminds me of the way that one of my favourite videogames, Sensible World of Soccer, used to generate random player names. Throughout the course of the game you would receive a number of players on loan or on trial who were fictitious (as opposed to the 10,000 or so players in the game based on their real-life counterparts all over the world). The game would pick a forename and surname at random, and mash them up to create a new player. The problem was, it wouldn’t ensure that both forename and surname came from the same nation. My favourite Frankenstein’s Footballer was the English defender Thorvaldur Shipperley, who joined my Brighton & Hove Albion side on loan at one stage.

Great resources, thank you very much :). In how many weeks do you plan to lunch Highrise?

Put Kula bácsi in. Data:

Name: Kula bácsi

Address: Fostalicska u. 7

City: Bivalybasznád

Zip code: 9876

Country: Hungary

Another great place for names is the U.S. Census Bureau ( http://www.census.gov/ ) which I have used. Their 1990 name files (surname, male first names, female first names) make a great random name generator foundation.

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/names_files.html

Whoops…it is definitely Monday.

U.S. Census Bureau

and

1990 U.S. Census Names Files