Continuous performance Monitoring

Performance testing is an important and integral part of most testing projects. This type of testing corresponds to Q4 of the Agile testing quadrant. You can find interesting insights on the agile testing quadrants in this post by Lisa Crispin.

Usually performance testing teams are different from functional testing teams and their reports / data etc are not easily available to to the entire team. I wanted to have more visibility, integration and feedback about the performance of application - essentially I was looking for Continuous Performance Monitoring.

In this post I will discuss what is continuous performance monitoring and how useful it is to report performance trends for every build.

In my current project, I am using TeamCity as the build server. TeamCity supports custom charts for any data. I thought, It should be possible to have performance data from all the teams in a particular format and ...

This post is a combination of two things - an advise and a request. In case you are wondering, it is not complicated advise and simple request, it's a simple advise and challenging request. If you like challenges of testing web applications, you may like this challenge as well.

So let's talk about the advise first. Find defects to find defects quicker - I am sure most of us already know this, isn't it? But sometime we do need to state and explain obvious. We do it all the time in testing - we state and explain obvious defects isn't it? Well, we need to that because obvious is obviously not obvious for everyone :-)

Software testing is a skilled profession and like all the skilled professions, you get better at it with practice. However, there is a difference between doing day-to-day testing in job for many years and practicing ...

Disclaimer - This post is about the announcement of my pet project - http://www.iCheckWebsite.com

From past few weeks I was focusing on my pet project, iCheckWebsite.com. I was wearing many hats - product owner, scrum master, designer, occasional developer and tester. It was fun and our shiny new version is live now :-) Wearing so many hats was/is difficult and to be honest - it probably means compromising little bit. But hey, it’s okay for self funded start-ups to compromise a little bit. Iterations are not long and hopefully in every new iteration - product will become better and better.

So let me explain what is iCheckWebsite, it’s core idea and how it could be extremely useful for testers working in the web application domain.

iCheckWebsite is an on-demand test automation and content monitoring tool for websites . iCheckWebsite makes it extremely easy to test and monitor content of websites ...

Software testing is a relatively new field and has changed considerably in past few years. It is not taught in many universities and when I moved from development to testing in 2001, I was confused about it. I tried to learn from internet, books, forums and was not impressed with the information I got. I even did my certification (CSTE, if you are interested) but that wasn't very useful either. During that time, I came across many interesting theories / concepts and after working in the industry, I know they are not true, and are myths. Unfortunately, some of these myths are still in practice and widespread.

Myths in software testing has done this field more harm than good. In this post, I will explore popular software testing myths, why they are myths and what wrong these myths are doing to our profession?

1. Testers are Gatekeepers Of Quality - Nothing ...

Web applications are everywhere and most of us test them to earn our bread and butter. Broadly speaking, there are two types of web applications or websites - One which provide service and another which provide content. Web applications such as emails, facebook, bank or blogging platform provide a specific service and BBC, Times and many such sites provide content.

Irrespective of the type of web application, all of them need to understand user behaviour on the site and gather key usage pattern. One common way of doing this is with the help of analytic code. As a tester, it is important for us to understand how it works and how it can be tested. In this entry, I will discuss this in more detail and show you how iCheckWebsite can be used to test analytic code.

So what is Analytic code? Analytic code is usually a java script snippet which ...

Jira is a very powerful tool and can be used as defect tracking system as well as planning tool for Agile projects. In this article, I will describe some interesting ways in which Jira can be configured and improve your productivity - with respect to defect tracking systems. Like many tools, Jira provide you capabilities and how you use it to increase your productivity is up to you.

Lets start with project categories. When you login in to Jira, in the top left corner there are two links for Project and Project Categories. Using project category you can define how projects should be categorized. For example, you might want to categorize projects based on - whether they are being dealt by Team A or Team B, whether its a new development or ongoing maintenance and so on.

Creating new categories and changing them is very easy and probably self explanatory. Categories can ...

Recently I finished a three days training course on Rapid Software Testing with Michael Bolton in London UK. This course was very effective and had elements related to learning, questioning and thinking all along. It reinforced my belief that testing is not a ‘phase’ performed towards the end or a ‘100% automated suite’ as claimed by many Agile shops. Software testing is much more than that and it is extremely important for the successful delivery of any project.

This was my first training course related to software testing and I was extremely happy with the outcome of this course. I have tried to capture my experience of this course in the following paragraphs.

Day -1

Training started with the discussion on a seemingly simple concept i.e. understanding of ‘problem’. One thing that is bound to happen in Michael’s class is lots and lots of questions. These questions are ...

We have seen many discussions on why people came into software testing and why they still love to work as a tester. People have interesting reasons, for some people its creativity, for some people its challenges of automation, for some its relation to system thinking, domain expertise etc. All of these are good reasons to be in testing field and if you are in testing because of similar reasons, probably you are enjoying your work and may be exciting people around you about testing.

Unfortunately, over the years I have seen many people staying as tester because of wrong reasons as well. Following list is the collection of wrong reasons / motivation to be in software testing field and work as a tester. If you are in testing because one of these reasons, probably you need to find a good mentor, understand testing properly or change your field.

1. Software Testers ...