Software performance testing

Performance testing in Java environments

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:27:37 GMT

If you are looking for a paper on performance testing in the Java environment, then there is one at Tech Republic here.
It looks at three key areas: the software testing products from unit testing right through to acceptance in production; the reasons for automating testingl and the tools that are needed throughout the SDLC.

Load testing service

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:44:14 GMT

Acutest , the UK software testing solution provider, have announced the launch of their new load testing service: the Load Cannon. This is a performance testing service for web-enabled applications and websites. Hosted in the UK, it is a fusion of performance testing tools; load generators; monitors; structured testing methods; risk-based testing techniques and experienced

The load testing service is designed to be robust, quick to operate, capable of both onsite and offsite deployment and is also scalable. The pricing has been designed for the current economic climate. There are no testing tool license costs or restrictions such as rental periods. There are no additional costs for simulating high volumes of users, or transactions, in a test scenario. And you only pay for what you use.

A risk assessment is carried out at the start of the assignment and the testing is prioritised by business impact and likelihood of failure so organisations can match their budget with the level of risk they want to mitigate. This enables them to choose the level of performance testing they want, ranging from a simple benchmark load test to a comprehensive set of performance tests for a complex web-enabled system. So now organisations no longer have to live with the untested risk of performance failure.

Independent testing value

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:28:12 GMT

Third-party software testing for mobile applications will boost the testing market in India. With companies planning to cut down on the cost and manpower, testing companies sees domestic market as an opportunity.

According to research firm IDC, the global software testing market is estimated at $13 billion of which India accounts for $1 billion.
Mukesh Sharma, founder and chief executive officer of QA InfoTech, said that the recession has proved to be a positive for testing firms in India.

“Indian companies have started realising the importance of independent third-party testing. Unlike the US market, Indian companies do not carry out independent testing, but this trend is changing now as companies have started focusing on their core job and outsourcing it to testing companies,” he said.

For the full article visit the Financial Chronicle

SDLC testing tool finds UK market interest

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:20:23 GMT

Acutest, a QA and software testing company, has announced a strong demand for Software Planner in the UK.

Software Planner is an award winning ALM tool (Application Lifecycle Management) that helps organisations manage all components of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This includes managing project deliverables, requirements, defects, test cases, test execution and help desk support.

“We had anticipated there would be a real demand for Software Planner in the UK, when we formed the partnership with Prgamatic Software, the US developer of the testing management tool, to bring it to the UK market.” said Barry Varley, Managing Director of Acutest. “But we have been surprised at the how fast interest has picked up. The recession in the UK has made many organisations cautious about spending on SDLC test tools. But the immediate value that Software Planner offers has led to a host of enquiries, particularly for the SaaS version of the product. Within a fortnight of announcing the Acutest and Pragmatic Software partnership, we’d signed up our first customer for Software Planner: HMD Clinical."

“HMD clinical is a software house developing databases and applications for the clinical trial industry. We operate in an extremely regulated industry that demands high quality, traceable requirements and needed a solution that enabled us to link activities from requirements gathering through design, build, testing and release,” an HMD Clinical spokesman said. “On evaluating many different products, we found there was no shortage of excellent project, requirements, test and defect management solutions, but most were limited to only 1 or 2 of these functions. Software Planner was the only one that provided it all in a single package. Using Software Planner will ensure that we have clear visibility of the entire system validation process."

Software Planner provides features for managing all phases of the software development lifecycle within a single integrated tool. It supports all development methodology including Agile, Waterfall, Iterative, and Spiral. It is available in two versions: an enterprise version which a client installs in their own environment and a Software as a Service (SaaS) version which is hosted by Pragmatic Software.

IEEE 828 testing standard

Thu, 28 May 2009 14:44:37 GMT

IEEE 829-1998, also known as the 829 Standard for Software Test Documentation, is an IEEE standard that specifies the form of a set of documents for use in eight defined stages of software testing, each stage potentially producing its own separate type of document. The standard specifies the format of these documents but does not stipulate whether they all must be produced, nor does it include any criteria regarding adequate content for these documents. These are a matter of judgement outside the purview of the standard. The documents are:

Test Plan
Test Design Specification
Test Case Specification
Test Procedure Specification
Test Item Transmittal Report
Test Log
Test Incident Report
Test Summary Report

For the full article visit Wikipedia

Test tool and conformance process

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:49:11 GMT

The Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF) announced Tuesday that it has released its test tool and conformance process, giving manufacturer’s the ability to declare that its products meet the standard group’s specifications.

According to a statement, the organization said that the test tool and conformance process “strengthens its position” as the lead standardization initiative and that they will now focus on the global interoperability of IP video solutions.

For the full story visit IP Security

Conformance testing

ALM testing tool partnership

Sat, 16 May 2009 11:47:50 GMT

Pragmatic Software Company, a leading provider of application life-cycle management solutions, has partnered with Acutest, a leading software test company, to bring Software Planner to the United Kingdom.

Software Planner is an award winning ALM testing tool (Application Life-cycle Management) that helps Information Technology (IT) departments manage all components of software development including managing customer requirements, project deliverables, test cases, defects, and support tickets. Software Planner also provides collaborative tools like document sharing, team calendars, interactive dashboards, knowledge bases and threaded discussions and integrates with most of the major automated testing tools. Software Planner is currently being used by over 70,000 users in 24 countries.

"We are delighted to be partnering with Pragmatic Software to bring the Software Planner tool to the UK market: both the company and the product are very impressive," says Barry Varley, CEO of Acutest. "At Acutest we're proud of our ability to create new tailored testing service solutions, to meet the complex demands of our clients, and to deliver them quickly. Software Planner adds another very effective building block to the mix and we envisage a wide range of situations in which it will provide tremendous value."

"We are excited about having a local presence in London UK as this will provide Software Planner clients access to a knowledgeable software test consultancy that can help them maximize their use of Software Planner," says Steve Miller, President/CEO of Pragmatic Software. "When looking for a partner in the United Kingdom, we searched for a company with a solid track record of outstanding performance that is knowledgeable in testing applications under a variety of different methodologies -- including waterfall, agile, and RUP. Acutest's experience with SAP performance testing was a big plus. We are excited about offering clients in the UK an awarding winning application lifecycle management tool backed by experts in testing that service their locality.", adds Miller.

SAP testing

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:08:03 GMT

Functional, integration and regression testing

Testing is very important before going live with any system. Before going live with a SAP system, it is vital to do many different kinds of testing, since there is often a large, complex infrastructure of hardware and software involved. Both requirements as well as quality parameters are to be tested. Important types of testing are:

Functional testing: to test using functional use cases, i.e. a set of conditions or variables under which a tester will determine if a certain business process works
Integration testing
Regression testing

All tests should be preceded by creating solid test plans.

Systems and stress testing

Another vital preparation activity before going live with SAP is systems and SAP stress testing. This means planning, scripting, executing and monitoring system and stress tests, to see if the expectations of the end users, defined in service level agreements, will be met. This can be done with SAP’s standard application benchmarks, to benchmark the organization’s configurations against configurations that have been tested by SAP’s hardware technology partners. Again, a test plan should be created at first

For the full article visit Wikipedia

SAP User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:23:38 GMT

Testing SAP requires the involvement of the end users of the systems, They know the outcomes expected from the combination of the organisations business processes and the SAP business modules (such as FI, MM, AM and HR).

Yet these users have two problems to overcome: they are very rarely trained in how to test effectively and they often have a business as usual job to run while they do the testing as well. These mean they have little time to spare for testing and what time they have is not spent as efficiently as they would like. A double whammy that often limits the value of user acceptance testing SAP implementations.

This course on SAP user acceptance testing is designed to address that very problem. It is also suitable for many of the other participants in SAP UAT such as business analysts, SAP implementors and managers of acceptance test.

Software testing in the Telecoms Market Sector

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:10:12 GMT

The specific challenges for the Telecommunications software testing community have their basis in the complexity and diversity within the Operational Support Systems (OSS) Architecture and the associated commercial and financial pressures that exist to ensure first to market products.

The Telcos (large telecommunications service providers) are moving towards a standardised Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that has an emphasis on reusability and common capabilities in order to deliver consistent customer experience. These architectures will support the full range of business activities including Customer Care, Billing and Order Processing; Service Execution Management; Resource Management; Portfolio Management; Enterprise Information Management; Collaborations (with Customers, Users, Employees, Partners and Suppliers).

A Telecoms tester must also possess skills and experience beyond the generic ability to write and execute tests. This is because of the varied range of functional areas that telecoms software testing encompasses:

Technical Domain and Network Access areas
Billing and payment processing
Collaborations between telecoms service providers
Customer Relation Management (CRM

There is also a need to have the relevant expertise to facilitate testing across the products and services offerings, for example:

Mobile applications
Broadband and internet applications
IPTV (Internet TV)
VOIP applications.

However, a single software tester can't be expected to possess the experience to cover all of these areas and functions. The tester must communicate effectively as it is imperative that they can converse throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), with Business Analysts (BA), Designers, Developers, Third party supplies, Customers and End users throughout the different test phases such as customer acceptance testing and system integration testing.

There is also the issue of data to consider. This may result in the tester selecting or creating data for tests. Or in the case of the introduction of new platforms and data structures, there a need for data migration activities to take place, this means that the tester needs to have the capacity to understand and verify the transformed or migrated data.

And there are other trends which are also having a bearing on the future of testing software in Telecoms:

Agile Testing: Until recently the principal approach to software testing was the Waterfall or V model, Due to the scale of many projects it was not uncommon for the need for a specific product or the technology to be rendered obsolete before it was delivered. This lead to increased interest in Agile methodologies, including agile software testing, in an attempt to meet the demand for faster time to market. This change in itself has brought its own challenges in terms of managing the array of smaller agile projects and ensuring change control across the varied components, computer systems and telecom platforms.

Outsourced QA and testing: In recent years it has become popular for testing to be outsourced to offshore test factories with the aim of reduced cost and delivery timescales. The test factories provide automated regression test services which constantly run on the test environments to identify if any errors have been introduced as a result of recently delivered code.

Testing Environments: These can be complex and expensive to establish and maintain, it is common for environments to be shared by many systems and integration test teams, however this can produce a configuration management headache.

Stress testing in the Finance Sector

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:17:41 GMT

In the financial services business, stress testing is a widely used method of figuring out how strong a bank's balance sheet is — essentially using computer models based on historical data to judge how it would withstand various hypothetical situations.

The process is sometimes called "shocking" its books. How would a bank's loan portfolio fare if the growth rate fell as low as it was in 1991, or 1930? How would its deposit base do if unemployment rose to where it was in 1982?

"The stress test is designed to answer the question, 'How much worse would things get if the economy continues to deteriorate?' and, therefore, 'How much capital should the banks be required to hold to protect against that adverse outcome?' " says Albert Kyle, professor of finance at the University of Maryland.

Extract from npr

Software tester to Software Developer Ratio

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:15:34 GMT

An long-standing question in the software development world is: what is the correct ratio of testers to developers? A recent thread on the Scrum Development list asked how agile impacts this ratio. The answer to the first question seems to be 'It depends'. The answer to the second question, according to Elisabeth Hendrickson, is that agile teams can do more testing, with fewer testers.

For the full article visit Info Q

Agile testing software development

Performance testing interoperability of HP Loadrunner and Shunra VE Desktop

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:32:08 GMT

Shunra announced the HP certification of Shunra VE Desktop for HP Software, a Windows-based solution that tests the impact of applications on networks in all developmental stages by emulating a wide area network (WAN) and detailing network conditions seamlessly during load testing. The interoperability with HP LoadRunner enables a powerful, integrated solution offering customers highly-accurate, network performance testing.

“Application performance testing labs are looking to lower costs, while delivering load test results in a simple, repeatable manner,” said Subbu Iyer, Senior Director of Products, Performance Center and LoadRunner, Software, HP. “The combination of HP LoadRunner with Shunra VE Desktop for HP Software allows customers to achieve this and test network-aware applications with a WAN emulation capability.”

For the full article visit Business Wire

Web site testing service announced

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:22:27 GMT

LLC (WSO), a leading website optimisation provider, announces RapidaptSM, their breakthrough adaptive multivariate testing service to ignite website conversions and profits for small to mid-sized companies. RapidaptSM is designed for websites with low to medium traffic that need higher site-related income fast. WSO’s Adaptive Multivariate Testing Service quickly generates more sales leads from existing site traffic.

Unlike existing alternatives, RapidaptSM is able to boost conversion rates right from the start, even during the testing period. Its unique self-adjusting method adapts to visitor traffic in real time and, after a very brief learning period, narrows content variations to those that produce the highest conversion rates. RapidaptSM provides higher revenues far faster than the competition.

For the full story visit PR Leap

Website testing services performance

Grid Tools aids data testing efficiency

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:57:21 GMT

Grid-Tools Ltd has announced the inclusion of their database shrinking tool, DataShrink, into the 'GT Datamaker Complete Testing Tool-Set'. DataShrink is now offered to IT testing departments as either a separate tool for shrinking major databases (particularly Oracle's E-Business Suite), or available as part of the Datamaker complete test suite.

GT Datamaker editions offer test data generation to create accurate test data, data masking, data scrambling, data modelling, data quality assurance, subsetting, database compare, a test data warehouse and ‘Test Data on Demand'. With the launch of their new product, DataShrink, Grid-Tools have come full circle with their suite of testing tools. The entire suite provides a successful and compelling proposition to companies looking to improve testing efficiency, reduce IT expenditure, ensure legal compliance and add essential infrastructure to their testing methodologies.

For the full story visit Open PR

QA software testing

Testing new online crime maps in London

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:12:52 GMT

The London Metropolitan Police Service has released an online crime map of the Greater London area which enables users to view crime levels across the capital.

Powered by the Google Maps service, the site displays an aggregrated total of burglaries, theft and vehicle offences for all areas within the M25, excepting the City of London, which has its own police force. The maps, which are searchable by postcode and borough, also feature the ability to compare crime figures over the past three years, and view the number of offences committed month by month.

The site is visible to the public though still in a testing stage, and represents the fifth area in the country to be crime mapped, with similar services available in the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Hampshire and Lancashire.

For the full article visit The Independent

Load and stress testing services

Independent testing value

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:14:14 GMT

PureSpectrum has received data generated through recent independent testing that demonstrates continued performance gains for the company's proprietary dimming ballast technology for Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) bulbs.

The tests were performed at the request of lighting manufacturers to confirm that PureSpectrum's unique electronic ballast circuitry topology would meet various commercial production standards. PureSpectrum president and CEO Lee Vanatta said preliminary results from the performance tests indicate the technology met or exceeded the necessary performance benchmarks in all areas and the company will move forward with licensing discussions based upon these test results.

The tests were conducted at Independent Testing Laboratories, an NVLAP-certified facility in Colorado, and the data generated reinforces PureSpectrum's position within the lighting industry as leading innovator for dimming ballast technology for fluorescent lighting.

For the full story visit Market Watch

iReply testing solution

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:19:29 GMT

An alternative to traditional load simulators and scripting tools, iReplay(TM) allows organizations to capture full-scale production SQL workloads, and then reproduce the same workloads with all of their native complexity for analysis in test environments. This approach effectively eliminates the gap between production traffic and simulated test conditions, allowing organizations to predict more reliably the impact of changes to critical information systems, while substantially reducing the associated risks.

"In simple terms," says company founder Hardev Dhindsa, "We're reducing the odds that something unexpected can slip through the cracks. It's a rare company that hasn't been stung at some point by a nasty software bug showing up in production, even after weeks or months of lab tests. The reason is pretty simple: simulators can't really duplicate the complexity of live production traffic. iReplay can."

According to Mr. Dhindsa, iReplay test runs will accurately reproduce the behavior and complexity of the original SQL workload, maintaining concurrency and contention while allowing the flexibility to tailor replay runs to meet specific test objectives.

Recommended for regression testing, functional testing, performance testing and capacity planning applications, iReplay(TM) is now available for Sybase, Oracle and DB2. The company also announced plans to release a version for use with Microsoft SQL Server, including support for encrypted traffic, by Q4 08.

For the full article visit Newsblaze

Test Lab

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:01:00 GMT

Ultimately, the lab will be the final stop for potentially dozens of services and applications riding on Comcast’s video, broadband data and voice plant.

“It’s all about testing to make sure anything new can be provisioned and billed for, and to make sure we have the right tools to understand what kind of problems can arise,” Field said.

“We built it so that vendors can come in to do early interoperability testing, to isolate problems they may not see in their test facilities — but would in ours,” said Field.

Rack upon racks of gear line the vast building, like some futuristic department store. There’s a training room, and a legacy testing lab, important so that new applications don’t crash devices that are already installed in people’s homes. There’s also a troubleshooting area, to fix problems as they occur — but preferably before they occur.

Disaster recovery protocols are studied here so that redundant routes can be instantly activated to move information and communications traffic. Likewise, automatic testing lets an operator test multiple devices with multiple applications without having a person sitting there loading each application. Essentially, more testing, faster. Comcast engineers can also test unattended, which means they can do this testing from somewhere other than where the equipment is.

For power, Downingtown features substantial generator backup. Battery backup, too — enough for 15 minutes of clean, uninterrupted power. That translates into a room full of stacked, car-battery-sized batteries.

For the full article go to Multichannel News

Business Continuity Testing

Application testing

Sat, 31 May 2008 17:51:44 GMT

The application testing and review process that is used to approve BREW applications for distribution to customers is well known for its rigorous requirements.

Operators know that an application that successfully makes its way through the certification process will perform well and will download over-the-air to the device as it should. It will not interfere with a handset's voice services, disrupt the handset's hardware or firmware, or cause problems to the network. And the application will be digitally signed by an approved developer, which ensures that it is an authentic BREW product.

The process, called "True BREW Certification," has been in place since the inception of BREW in 2001, when it was used to evaluate the applications that ran on the first BREW-enabled handset. Since those initial implementations, thousands of applications have been introduced by more than 80 developers, whose products are offered on devices from 45 manufacturers for use on 60 operator networks. Today, True BREW testing must meet those volumes and it must consider, as well, how applications use newer technologies and features now popular on mobile phones, such as Bluetooth, streaming media and GPS-enabled location-based services, and how the software interacts with the network or a content provider's server.

Despite the market growth and some increasingly sophisticated tests, the True BREW testing process itself and the basic testing criteria haven't changed much over the years

For the full artilce go to Fierce Developer

Customer experience testing

Was Acceptance Testing to blame?

Sat, 24 May 2008 20:19:07 GMT

According to Mr. Azodi, the project managers at Dräger for the Irasco security system claimed that they had been blind-sided by the new requirement that the security system would be tested at Dräger’s facilities in Germany. They alleged that they would get in trouble with the company if they now had to buy a second copy of the software for testing in Germany after already having told Irasco it would have to procure the software on its own for the final system. The factory acceptance testing would now require two copies of the software and, according to Azodi, the managers said that they hadn’t factored that into their planning for the project.

For the full story visit Ecport Law Blog

Testing application performance throughout development

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:24:51 GMT

We recently surveyed 224 IT professionals and asked them about their company's interest in a tool that could be used to test application performance throughout the application lifecycle - from application design through ongoing management. Roughly three quarters of the survey respondents indicated that, "If the tool worked well it would make a significant improvement to our ability to manage application performance."

To dig deeper into this issue, we spoke with a consultant who is responsible for application testing at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. Since one of the reasons why applications run well over a LAN and run poorly over the WAN is the use of chatty protocols, we asked The consultant if his company ever deploys chatty applications. The Consultant said that his company often deployed chatty applications and that in some instances the problem is so bad that "the application just can not be deployed." He added that in many cases there is not an easy way to improve application performance and that "there is just so much that you can do with caching."

The discussion of chatty protocols demonstrates the need to be aware of the impact of the WAN on application performance during the application development lifecycle. In particular, it is important during application development to identify and eliminate any factor that could have a negative impact on application performance.

We asked an IT professional who is the manager of technology, architecture and engineering for a large international law firm for his opinion on this. He highlighted the importance of this approach when he stated, "It is much better to plan for the performance of an application during development than to scramble around after we develop it."

For the full article go to Network World

Views on software risk and security

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:29:36 GMT

McCabe brought his 20+ years of experience to the fore while pointing out that the keys to eliminating software vulnerability lie in the use of software complexity metrics, measuring control flow integrity and conducting sneak path analysis.

"There are no silver bullets when it comes to security metrics. Many of the issues surrounding security analysis are intertwined with fundamental software engineering principles," says McCabe. "Metrics such as the Relative Attack Surface Quotient (RASQ) from Microsoft, should be used in conjunction with traditional metrics that enable us to understand software and test it. Complexity, object-oriented metrics, and other metrics that help us understand the characteristics of our codebase are certainly relevant to software security. Software testing and code coverage metrics are also very relevant."

"Most exploits are about interactions: interactions between code statements, interactions between data and control flow, interactions between modules, interactions between your codebase and library routines, and interactions between your code and attack surface modules. Being cognizant of paths and subtrees within code is crucial for determining sneak paths, impact analysis, and testing to verify control flow integrity."

"For many years experts have been saying that software complexity is the worst enemy of security," says David Belhumeur, McCabe Software's CEO. "We must always be concerned about the vulnerability of critical software applications, especially when it could affect national security. Failure to uncover complexity, which is the root of vulnerability, could have dire consequences."

This came from PR Web

Testing quality assurance QA

Virtualization and testing

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:40:56 GMT

http://www.acutest.co.uk/acutest/acceptance-testing-course

For developers, the benefits of virtualization go well beyond making sure that your software doesn't crash your computer. It starts in the testing lab, where most software development organizations have rows of systems and monitors with different configurations, operating systems and installed software. Several years ago, I visited the headquarters of a large insurance company, whose test lab took up three acres of floor space and consisted of more than 4,000 servers and 4,000 clients. I would imagine that it is even larger today.

This software testing organization didn't have software permanently installed on any of these systems. Instead, it had a collection of thousands of different images. Its testers selected a group of server and client images based on the requirements stated in the test plan, sent those images off to a group of systems, and kicked off their test suite. This automated approach made possible a high level of app testing in a short period of time.

For the full article visit Redmond Developer News

Software testing market UK

Software testing training

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 11:50:46 GMT

IIST will be offering 20 different courses on software testing and quality assurance. The courses include:

Principles of Software Testing
Evaluating Business Eequirements
Effective Test Management
Principles of Software Test Automation
Writing Testable Requirements and Requirements Based Testing
Risk Based Test Management
Risk Based Testing: Analysis and Strategy Development
Software Quality Assurance Methods and Techniques
Test Process Management
Managing the Test Project
Test Process Measurement and Improvement
Test Automation Strategies and Architectures

For the full list of software testing training courses visit the IIST website

The International Institute for Software Testing (IIST) was founded in 1996 to serve testing and QA professionals. IIST's areas of expertise include: Software Testing, Test Management, Test Automation, Test Design Techniques, Test Process, Testing Web Applications and e-Business, Performance Testing, Software Quality, Quality Management, Software Quality Assurance, User Acceptance Testing, Software Inspections and Peer Reviews.