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 ...

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 ...

Most of the organizations these days understand the importance of unit testing and use it heavily in their project. Unit testing frameworks are available for most of the high-level languages like JUnit for Java, NUnit for .NET, pyunit for Python and so on. These unit testing tools have now reached a level of maturity and most of us have probably used them in some capacity. Unit testing Java Script is unfortunately, still a bit tricky and its integration with other tools is also not well known. In this article, I will try to explore how QUnit framework for testing Java Script can be integrated with Selenium and continuous Integration.

QUnit is a unit testing framework for JavaScript. It is capable of testing the JQuery code and server side code as well. QUnit tests require loading of the javascripts in the browser so even though they are unit tests their integration ...

I am a big fan of patterns and feel that ability to identify pattern is extremely useful for us testers. Patterns can be used in manual testing and automation both. In the following presentation, I will try to explain what are patterns, why patterns should be used in software testing and a nice tool we build utilizing the power of patterns.

Most of the patterns will have two main characteristics – they are repeatable and predictable. This repeatability and predictability is not limited to just development (as in design patterns), but can be used equally well in software testing. You can find a patterns in how testing is perceived by a specific manager and brace yourself to work (or argue) in a certain manner. You can find pattern in your own observation and figure out what sort of things you miss mostly. Probably there is a pattern in most of the ...

Have you ever thought why do you need to categorize software testing into different types? What is the benefits of dividing software testing in different types? One of the main purpose of software testing is to identify defects in the software. Defects in software testing can be defined as variance from requirement or user expectation. Based on this simple definition, it is very easy to categorize defects. For example:

• If system is not functioning properly, its a functional defect.
• If system is not performing well, its a performance defect.
• If system is not usable, its a usability defect
• If system is not secure, its a security defect
• and so on..

Identify these different defects require different skill set, different techniques and different type of test cases. Testing is divided into different types to reflect, what kind of defects can be uncovered by those activities. This division also helps management in ...

Security Testing is very important in today's world, because of the way computer and internet has affected the individual and organization. Today, it is very difficult to imagine world without Internet and latest communication system. All these communication systems increases efficiency of individual and organization by multifold.

Since every one from individual to organization, uses Internet or communication system to pass information, to do business, to transfer money it becomes very critical for the service provider to make sure that information and network are secured from the intruders.

Primary purpose of security testing is to identify the vulnerabilities and subsequently repairing them. Typically, security testing is conducted after the system has been developed, installed and is operational. Unlike other types of testing, network security testing is performed on the system on the periodic basis to make sure that all the vulnerabilities of the system are identified.

Network security testing ...

Grey box testing is the combination of black box and white box testing. Intention of this testing is to find out defects related to bad design or bad implementation of the system.

In gray box testing, test engineer is equipped with the knowledge of system and designs test cases or test data based on system knowledge.

For example, consider a hypothetical case wherein you have to test a web application. Functionality of this web application is very simple, you just need to enter your personal details like email and field of interest on the web form and submit this form. Server will get this details, and based on the field of interest pick some articles and mail it to the given email. Email validation is happening at the client side using Java Scripts.

In this case, in the absence of implementation detail, you might test web form with valid/invalid ...