According to Forrester Research companies use Microsoft Word out of habit, not necessity . The crux of the matter is that "Word has become so entrenched in the enterprise in the last 25 years, organizations cannot easily move off of it".

It goes on to explain how new and emerging web-based tools "make sharing documents and online collaboration more intuitive and easier for users" and are more cost effective.

This is a surprise?

In previous installments of this series, we looked at tokenization and at sentence boundary detection. In part 3, we'll talk about stemming and lemmatization.

Stemming is the process of "normalizing" tokens -- giving a standard form for tokens -- by looking for prefixes or suffixes and removing (or occasionally rewriting) them. This happens over a number of phases; the stemmer looks for and deals with one set of affixes, and when it's dealt with them, it looks for another set. At the end of this process, the part of the token that remains is called the stem.

When we embarked on the journey of implementing a new performance testing framework, I thought it would be a useful tool, I just did not realize how useful and how much I would enjoy solving problems with it.

Although we do a combination of manual and automated testing here (sometimes you just don't have a choice) we all firmly believe in automation and all the wonderful things it buys you: re-usability, reproducibility, consistency, etc. That's why we did not think twice about investing in implementing a framework that would help to get us to 100% automation of all our performance tests.

We started out thinking we would be writing a lot of Java code around a performance tool. We had some experience with JMeter and decided to keep using that. What we did not realize was how much we would be using Ant which we also had been using for compiling our code and running our JUnit tests. Instead of writing the Java code we thought we needed, we ended up using the very simple and convenient Ant tasks. We quickly realized that a lot of the functionality we needed was already provided by Ant! We gained a lot of time right there!