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 ...

I attended weekend testing America’s session number 18 on Saturday. It was my first WTA session and I must say it was a good learning experience. There was an interesting exercise given by James Bach. The exercise was about Test Charters.

As part of the exercise, we had to critique existing test charters and improve them. I went through the definition of test charter given in the exercise to understand more about test charters. I tried to critique and improve the example charters, based on the definition given in the exercise. I was not satisfied with the outcome and wanted someone to critique my (improved /modified) charters.

My (improved :-)/modified) test charter was discussed during the briefing session and Michael Larsen , Wade, Shrinik and Lalit gave interesting feedback on my charter. During that briefing session, I realised that I can draw analogy of writing test charters to writing user ...

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 ...

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 ...

Last month Komal Joshi and Patrick Martin presented @ GTAC 2008 conference in Seattle, USA. Google Test Automation Conference is one of the best conference for testing / automation and it was certainly a good experience for TestingGeek to present this at GTAC.

This presentation will give you basic information on how simple tools like SVN, batch files and task schedulers can be used to create Continuous Integration for mature desktop applications.

Solution like these are one of the best way to move teams towards more mature continuous integration environment. Using this approach, teams can start to see and appreciate benefits environment like this will bring to the projects.

Hope this presentation will be easy to follow and you will understand the basic concept behind this. Please subscribe to our newsletter if you want to remain on top of whatever is published on TestingGeek.