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 ...

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.

Rick Mugridge, Author of the famous book "Fit for Developing Software" explains the concept of story driven development, executable specifications and FitNesse. In this presentation, he addresses four main issues involved with software development and how FitNesse can be used to address following issues

1. How can we improve test coverage on a legacy system without discouraging its evolutio
2. How can QA be involved earlier and more effectively?
3. How can product managers better utilise their expertise?

Testing Mobile Handsets with FitNesse - Uffe Koch & Mark Boxall

In this lecture process and problems associated with developing mobile applications is discussed. Specifically, what kind of problems are associated with testing mobile applications, what type of test cases you need to write for mobile applications and how FitNesse can be used for mobile applications testing.

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 ...

If you work in web application testing, you probably know that Selenium is one of the best tool for automating web applications. Though it can be used to test various aspects of web application, sometime you need to find your way around when using Selenium, one such situation is testing flash component using Selenium. Developers use Flash to beautify their websites, but it makes test automation a challenging task because Selenium can not read or record any actions on flash objects.

There are two main issues that needs to be addressed while automating web applications involving flash objects -

• Verifying a certain value is set or it exists or not or in simple terms you need to 'get' certain properties of the object and compare it against your benchmarks
• Performing actions on an object or 'set' certain values.

These two issues could easily be handled by Selenium for most of the ...

Testing web application is always fun and if you are automating your web application testing with Selenium, its even more fun. Unfortunately, like any other tool selenium has few limitations. One of the most annoying limitation of selenium is its inability to handle browser windows (Or any other expected or unexpected windows). When we automate any application which launches these windows (For example security warning windows, certifications windows and so on), we get stuck by the inability of selenium to handle them. I have seen people executing those automated tests but clicking on OK/Yes/Continue manually whenever these windows appear. This defies the whole purpose of automation, because tests can not be executed without human intervention.

Though it is not possible to solve this problem using Selenium (As far as I know), but we can certainly combine Selenium with other tools to solve it. One option is to use ...