Software performance testing

We recently surveyed 224 IT professionals and asked them about their company's interest in a tool that could be used to test application performance throughout the application lifecycle - from application design through ongoing management. Roughly three quarters of the survey respondents indicated that, "If the tool worked well it would make a significant improvement to our ability to manage application performance."

To dig deeper into this issue, we spoke with a consultant who is responsible for application testing at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. Since one of the reasons why applications run well over a LAN and run poorly over the WAN is the use of chatty protocols, we asked The consultant if his company ever deploys chatty applications. The Consultant said that his company often deployed chatty applications and that in some instances the problem is so bad that "the application just can not be deployed." He added that in many cases there is not an easy way to improve application performance and that "there is just so much that you can do with caching."

The discussion of chatty protocols demonstrates the need to be aware of the impact of the WAN on application performance during the application development lifecycle. In particular, it is important during application development to identify and eliminate any factor that could have a negative impact on application performance. 

We asked an IT professional who is the manager of technology, architecture and engineering for a large international law firm for his opinion on this. He highlighted the importance of this approach when he stated, "It is much better to plan for the performance of an application during development than to scramble around after we develop it." 

For the full article go to Network World

McCabe brought his 20+ years of experience to the fore while pointing out that the keys to eliminating software vulnerability lie in the use of software complexity metrics, measuring control flow integrity and conducting sneak path analysis.

"There are no silver bullets when it comes to security metrics. Many of the issues surrounding security analysis are intertwined with fundamental software engineering principles," says McCabe. "Metrics such as the Relative Attack Surface Quotient (RASQ) from Microsoft, should be used in conjunction with traditional metrics that enable us to understand software and test it. Complexity, object-oriented metrics, and other metrics that help us understand the characteristics of our codebase are certainly relevant to software security. Software testing and code coverage metrics are also very relevant."

"Most exploits are about interactions: interactions between code statements, interactions between data and control flow, interactions between modules, interactions between your codebase and library routines, and interactions between your code and attack surface modules. Being cognizant of paths and subtrees within code is crucial for determining sneak paths, impact analysis, and testing to verify control flow integrity."

"For many years experts have been saying that software complexity is the worst enemy of security," says David Belhumeur, McCabe Software's CEO. "We must always be concerned about the vulnerability of critical software applications, especially when it could affect national security. Failure to uncover complexity, which is the root of vulnerability, could have dire consequences." 

This came from PR Web

Testing quality assurance QA

This software testing organization didn't have software permanently installed on any of these systems. Instead, it had a collection of thousands of different images. Its testers selected a group of server and client images based on the requirements stated in the test plan, sent those images off to a group of systems, and kicked off their test suite. This automated approach made possible a high level of app testing in a short period of time.

For the full article visit Redmond Developer News

Software testing market UK

• Principles of Software Testing
• Evaluating Business Eequirements
• Effective Test Management
• Principles of Software Test Automation
• Writing Testable Requirements and Requirements Based Testing
• Risk Based Test Management
• Risk Based Testing: Analysis and Strategy Development
• Software Quality Assurance Methods and Techniques
• Test Process Management
• Managing the Test Project
• Test Process Measurement and Improvement
• Test Automation Strategies and Architectures

The trouble with phased development processes such as Waterfall is that teams typically spend many months working exclusively on each phase so that their feedback loops are too long. For example, only when the analysis is complete do they proceed to design, and only when the design is done do they move into the coding phase. Although exhaustive checks at the end of each phase attempt to validate the work, it is only during the testing phase that anyone actually knows whether the program meets its objectives. Therefore, the only real feedback about your work comes many months, even years, after it was completed. Waterfall treats software development like a production line, requiring perfection at each stage of the process. If there is any mistake or if the requirement changes during the process, the resulting software will not be correct. This may work when you're maintaining or adapting a mature software product, but not when you're developing new products in the face of changing or unknown requirements. In these sorts of circumstances, you need to increase the amount of feedback by drastically reducing the time between code creation and its validation.

The emphasis on perfecting a design before it is put into code results from people's fear that cost of change will rise steeply as the project progresses. In a traditional Waterfall project, this fear is justified because the long feedback loop between design and test means that any mistakes will result in a significant amount of rework. However, as Scott Ambler points out, in an Agile project, the feedback loop between design and test is very short, so mistakes can be corrected much more cheaply.

An Agile team eschews the whole idea of phases so that it can get valuable feedback continuously from the very start of the project by producing the only thing that really counts: working code. Indeed, by the end of the first week, many teams will have demonstrated running software to the customer with some feature that has business value. The price paid for this rapid delivery of working code is that the team doesn't produce thick documents or detailed models of the system. Instead, it just concentrates on writing the tests and code necessary to implement its customer's stories, as summarized on 6-by-4-inch index cards.

UK test manager job

• Capacity of a system (often referred to as capacity planning)
• Performance of a particular application, such as a database

All good benchmarks use a well-defined testing methodology and measure system performance in an accurate and repeatable manner, allowing IT professionals to properly judge the performance and capacity of a system-under-test.

Benchmark Factory for Databases allows database professionals to implement benchmark specifications and control logic. Benchmark Factory is an easy-to-use load testing and capacity-planning tool for critical database environments. It places enormous stress (that, typically, is hard to achieve) on a database in a standard testing environment. A database usually breaks under extreme load - when it is needed the most. By identifying system capacity and performance bottlenecks before they occur, Benchmark Factory facilitates proactive testing that reduces downtime, development costs and potential loss of revenue. Benchmark Factory provides the ability to:

• Simulate thousands of concurrent users with a minimal amount of hardware, providing scalability to simulate large numbers of users.
• Control agents installed on client machine to spawn multiple virtual-user sessions, allowing the workload to be representative of the database being tested.
• Determine database throughput and capacity with reliable data points.
• View real-time testing results providing immediate feedback on database performance allowing an accurate assessment of a critical database system.
• Examine data points with a built-in report viewer or printed reports.