Timestamps from Heck: Minimizing Test Scenarios

I'm putting the disclaimer up front this time because it's a big assumption:

Disclaimer: This assumes your testing philosophy does not require you to test every variable in isolation, at least at first.

We can talk more about that assumption later, but let's get on with the timestamps.

To review, we have 8 separate timestamp-related scenarios and nowhere near enough testing time (hey, it's an almost universal truth). So what do we do? Combine and conquer! There are some locales around the world that cover multiple timestamp scenarios, so we use them. When there's a problem, we isolate each element of that particular locale and figure out which is the individual cause. Lete's assume our server is in US Eastern time zone

And the locales are:

1. Estonia

2. Thailand

3. Newfoundland

Estonia:

- classic European time format: DD.MM.YYYY HH:MM (24 hour)

- uses dots as date separators instead of forward slashes

- fun to say!

Thailand:

- HH:MM A/P MM/DD/YYYY

- year is 543 years ahead of US year

Newfoundland:

- GMT-3:30

- MM-DD-YYYY HH:MM (12 hour)

These cover a lot of our timestamp scenarios. The remainder are covered separately.

So go ahead, move to Newfoundland (figuratively, anyway) and test!