I’m working on the automated blackbox acceptance tests for Jenkins, where I often need to generate random unique names. The code has been using random number generator to generate such names, but as I was debugging test failures, it became painful to remember those random names.
For example, a test might create two new jenkins jobs “random_name_155230″ and “random_name_137204″. Now which one was supposed to be the upstream and which one is downstream? Aside from a few exceptions, humans are generally not good at remembering those random numbers.
So I thought it’d be a lot better if these names are more meaningful, like “constructive_carrot” or “flexible_designer”. That is, if I have a decent sized corpus of N English adjectives and M nouns, I can generate NxM unique names (and induce a few chuckles to whoever see the generated names.)
After a bit of googling, I came across wordnet, and I took a subset of its corpus to come up with a small library that generates human-friendly random names. It has about 600 adjectives and 2400 nouns, resulting in 1.5 million unique names before the generator wraps around.
You’d use this library like this:
RandomNameGenerator rnd = new RandomNameGenerator(0);
while (true)
System.out.println(rnd.next());
The code is under the BSD license with no advertisement clause, and the library is on Maven Central. Hope you find it useful.
