load testing

Articles

Monitoring dashboard with criteria set up Solving Production Issues Using Testing Tools

Standard web-monitoring tools can ping webpages and verify that they’re responding, but they don’t alert you to an issue. But you can use the technology in load testing to monitor your sites by running an interactive script that can detect issues and generate emails as needed. It runs constantly like a silent sentry, never sleeping or taking a vacation, improving your sites' reliability.
Nels Hoenig's picture Nels Hoenig
April 9, 2018
Mobile phone showing social media apps Designing Test Scenarios for Social Media Mobile Apps

The definitive features of a mobile social app are the ability to send and receive messages, push notifications, and sharing media such as photos, audio, and videos. While creating a test strategy for such apps, cross-platform compatibility is an important consideration. Here are some scenarios you should include in your test strategy for a social media mobile app.
Krishnan Govindarajan's picture Krishnan Govindarajan
March 26, 2018
Fraying rope Designing a Valuable Stress Test

If you're in a line of e-commerce that sometimes experiences site-crashing levels of volume, executing periodic stress tests is part of a good business plan. Nels Hoenig works for an electric company, so for his site, the main source of stress is power outages. Here, he details his search for a stress-testing tool, what he learned from the tests, and how he convinced others of the value of these tests.
Nels Hoenig's picture Nels Hoenig
February 12, 2018
Stopwatch timeout Using Test Automation Timeouts as Performance Alarms

In automated testing, one of the challenges to developing consistent and stable tests is loading and rendering time and latencies. This plays a larger role for web applications or other network dependent applications, especially with user interface automation. But you can design tests so that timeouts can be used to measure the performance of the application and service while testing the functionality.
Faisal Qureshi's picture Faisal Qureshi
December 11, 2017
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Better Software Magazine Articles

The Top 13 Mistakes In Load Testing Applications

This is a no-holds-barred discussion of common load testing errors and consequences. Load testing can and should be done long before a system has a stable or complete user interface. One reason that people often schedule load testing as a final step in a test or development plan is the confusion linking load testing with functional testing.
Mark D. Anderson
June 26, 2002
Trade Secrets from a Web Testing Expert

If you oversee a mission-critical Web site, you want to be able to predict how many users you can handle within acceptable response times. Here are three fundamental load testing concepts you can't do without.
Alberto Savoia
June 26, 2002
Avoiding Scalability Shock

Web application scalability tops the list of challenges for those designing and developing e-commerce sites. Here are five steps to managing the performance of e-business applications: architecture validation, performance benchmarking, performance regression testing, performance tuning and acceptance, and continuous performance monitoring.
Billie Shea
June 26, 2002
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Interviews

Jonathon Wright What Pokémon Go and Overwatch Can Teach Us about Scalability: An Interview with Jonathon Wright

In this on-site interview from STARWEST 2016, Jonathon Wright, the director of software engineering at CA Technologies and a speaker at the conference, joins Josiah Renaudin to discuss artificial intelligence, scaling for load, and virtual reality.
Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
November 25, 2016
How Netflix Embraces Complexity without Sacrificing Speed: An Interview with Casey Rosenthal
Podcast

In this interview, Netflix’s Casey Rosenthal explains how to engineer trust within complex systems. He describes what it’s like to work at Netflix, how the company maintains complexity without sacrificing speed, and why all the teams don’t necessarily follow agile practices.
Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
October 7, 2016
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Conference Presentations

STARWEST 2005: Testing Dialogues - Technical Issues

Is there an important technical test issue bothering you? Or, as a test engineer, are you looking for some career advice? If so, join experienced facilitators Esther Derby and Elisabeth Hendrickson for "Testing Dialogues-Technical Issues." Practice the power of group problem solving and develop novel approaches to solving your big problem. This double-track session takes on technical issues, such as automation challenges, model-based testing, testing immature technologies, open source test tools, testing web services, and career development. You name it! Share your expertise and experiences, learn from the challenges and successes of others, and generate new topics in real-time. Discussions are structured in a framework so that participants receive a summary of their work product after the conference.
Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
A Strategic Approach - "Beta the Business"

Beta testing is an industry standard practice to obtain user feedback prior to general availability of software. Have you ever considered that the Beta release can be used to validate the software's value to customers and application users? Extending the Beta concept will result in higher customer satisfaction (and higher revenue for commercial products). Also, you can employ Beta testing to evaluate not only the software product, but the distribution (and sales) process, training, customer support, and usage within your customers' environments. Far beyond just finding defects in the product, you can focus Beta testing on how well the software is meeting your customers' needs. What does that mean to the Development team and the organization as a whole? What are the risks and challenges that we face? What are the rewards?
Pete Conway, EMC Corporation
Getting Started with Test Driven Development

Test-driven (or test first) development (TDD) is an excellent method for improving the quality of software applications. It forces the programmer to focus on ensuring that the behavior of the objects at the lowest level of the system is appropriate. It also provides a mechanism to ensure that future source code changes do not break existing behaviors. Using C++ as the example language, Robert Walsh presents an overview of test-driven development, available TDD testing frameworks, and a demonstration of a project started from scratch using TDD. You can apply these concepts to other languages, including Java and Visual Basic. Learn how to overcome the initial hurdles many developers experience when starting out with TDD.

  • An introduction to test-driven development using C++ as the example language
  • The testing frameworks available for TDD
  • Programming tasks that are difficult to implement using TDD
Robert Walsh, EnvisionWare, Inc.
Design Testability and Service Level Measurements into Software

Design and architecture decisions made early in the project have a profound influence on the testability of an application. Although testing is a necessary and integral part of application development, architecture and design considerations rarely include the impacts of development design decisions on testability. In addition, build vs. buy, third party controls, open source vs. proprietary, and other similar questions can affect greatly the ability of an organization to carry out automated functional and performance testing-both positively and negatively. If the software or service is delivered to a separate set of end-users who then need to perform testing activities, the problems compound. Join Jay Weiser to find out about the important design and architecture decisions that will ensure more efficient and effective testability of your applications.
Jay Weiser, WorkSoft
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