Software testing tools and load testing information

Testing software testXpert® II has been developed by Zwick to be fully integrated option to meet the requirements of FDA 21 CFR Part 11. These guidelines, set by the US Food and drug Administration, are intended to make sure that each record can be traced back to its source. The time and date of any data produced and/or changed must also be recorded and data can only be amended by authorized personnel, who must be clearly indicated within the amendment process.

All Zwick’s testing systems which are used to evaluate the properties of materials and components in the pharmaceutical and medical engineering industry are controlled by the industry leading testXpert® software which has many levels of administration and security protection allowing only authorized people to create test results, or amend previously stored data.

The testing sequence itself is often defined by International or individual company standards and, with testXpert, even the most sophisticated software testing services can be easily configured and password protected to prevent unauthorized changes.

The benefit of testXpert® compared to many other existing materials testing packages is that the FDA 21 CFR Part 11 traceability is integrated into the operating core of the software thereby avoiding the need for third party solutions, audits and associated high costs.

For the full article visit here

UK independent tour operator, Cosmos, and Monarch Airlines have become customers of Empirix performance and load testing products as new customers. Both companies are part of the Monarch Travel Group, which is investing substantially in the performance of their web applications, in an effort to ensure a top-rate experience via their websites for every customer, every time.

Both Cosmos and Monarch are deploying Empirix’s e-TEST suite product to test new web applications. They will also use Empirix’s managed testing service, e-LoadExpert, to easily and rapidly test the performance and scalability of their web applications under heavy user load, to ensure that transactions are completed quickly and accurately. In an e-LoadExpert test, the team also monitors the performance of back-end application infrastructure to identify bottlenecks and help tune application performance.
For the full article go here

In a press release from Market Wire, Empirix announced its Hammer for IMS platform now provides even more options for advanced feature testing, load testing, and analysis of emerging IMS applications.

“As IMS networks move from design to deployment, vendors and service providers have uncovered many new test requirements, such as DIAMETER testing for subscriber databases, emulating IMS infrastructure devices, and testing specific application scenarios in the IMS domain.

The enhancements to Empirix’s Hammer for IMS platform improve its ability to test IMS applications, devices, and networks and extend the company’s call generation and analysis capabilities for IMS. These enhancements include additional protocol support, new IMS infrastructure device emulations, and full incorporation of 3GPP SIP extensions for complete emulation of an IMS User Element (UE). Specifically, the Hammer for IMS platform can now be used to test the following common IMS-enabled features:

• Consumer VoIP Services;
• Fixed-mobile Convergence;
• Presence-based Applications;
• Push-to-talk over Cellular;
• IP Centrex; and
• Centralised Subscriber Data Repositories.

Enhancements to Empirix’s IMS testing platform also include additional device emulations, such as full support of Session Control Functions, Application Servers, Home Subscriber Servers, and Charging Functions, as well as Gateways, Gateway Controllers, Media Servers and Border Control Functions. “

Siemens and Acutest have combined forces to present a one day management briefing on Application development. It covers the management of the software application development process and will enable the delegates to ensure their organisations implement effective and appropriate management controls.

The development of application software to meet end user expectations, time and budget is complex and difficult to achieve. There are many reasons why application development projects seem to fail:

* Incorrectly defined functional specifications
* The relevant regulation and legislation is not understood and defined
* Projects and suppliers are not tightly managed
* Limited ability of the organisation to assess the solution against functional specification
* The application availability (load, performance, security, resilience and disaster recovery) is considered only at the later stages of the project affecting budget.

* View the seminar agenda
* More information about Acutest independent London testing consultancy

Compuware announced on Presswire that Dickinson Wright, PLLC, implemented
Compuware Vantage to ensure that the organisation’s most important
technology assets perform well for its attorneys.

Issues that impact the productivity of legal staff have a direct effect on any law firm’s bottom line, especially when the issue involves a lawyer’s most essential communication tools such as the telephone, e-mail or Blackberry servers. Dickinson Wright implemented Compuware Vantage after encountering problems with a VoIP phone system upgrade. The firm was experiencing frequent outages of long-distance and voicemail services, cutting vital lines of communication between lawyers and their clients.
Compuware Vantage also made an immediate impact on Dickinson Wright’s bottom line. Kolb estimates that the company realized a six-figure ROI by solving the VoIP problems and by allowing the lawyers to do their jobs without facing technology performance issues. Kolb says many of his IT colleagues in the legal profession face similar phone and communications issues that could be solved using Compuware Vantage. “If you talk to a lot of the law firms that are running VoIP phones, a lot of them aren’t happy because they haven’t identified the problem like we have with Compuware Vantage,” he explained.
Dickinson Wright built on its success with Compuware Vantage by expanding the use of the suite to the pre-production environment. The firm uses Compuware Vantage’s service assurance capabilities for performance testing on its document management system to ensure that new versions of the application meet service levels before they go live. Kolb and his staff also use Compuware Vantage to monitor the flow of data between the company’s six offices, giving them the ability to see where bottlenecks are occurring and how they can be fixed. By giving Dickinson Wright’s IT staff the visibility into where in the network problems take place, Compuware Vantage makes it easier and quicker to fix those problems.
Compuware Vantage is an application service management solution that helps IT organizations manage application performance from the perspective that matters most: that of the end-user. Vantage delivers the most robust end-user monitoring solution in the industry with integrated, end-to-end performance analysis. Its unique network insight from the application’s view enables the deepest understanding of a transaction’s performance for accurate, root-cause analysis.

From IT Week:

Almost half of IT departments are failing to comply with the Data Protection Act (DPA) because they use live customer data to test applications without customers’ permission, according to research published today.
A survey of 100 senior IT decision makers by IT management software vendor Compuware found 44 percent were guilty of this practice, putting them at risk of prosecution under the DPA. Forty-eight percent said they were only “vaguely familiar” with this law.Ian Clarke, global sales director for enterprise solutions at Compuware, said that using live customer data for testing in this way is not only illegal but also increases the risk of security breaches. “Testing environments tend to be insecure, with data often printed out and moved around,” he said. “The fines for breaching the DPA may be relatively small but the real risk is the damage to reputation following data breaches.”
The survey also indicates that firms that send application testing offshore are not doing enough to protect customer data. Eighty-three percent said the only step they took to secure data when outsourcing it to third parties was to set up non-disclosure agreements.
Clarke said companies should employ software testing tools that automatically replace live customer data with dummy data to reduce the risk of security breaches and ensure compliance with the DPA.

Application testing services

And here is Part 2 of Comparing Tomcat Performance Across Platforms

“In Part 1 of this article, we examined the relative performance differences, noting the behavioral differences as the servers approached capacity. This limitation was easily remedied by increasing the memory available to Tomcat. Here we’ll present the behavior of the servers after this change was made to their configuration.”

For information on Load testing services in the UK

Good artilcle comparing Apache Tomcat performance differences between the Windows and Linux platforms.

The Tests

“Public Web sites and intranet applications see distinctively different distributions of user bandwidth. For public Web sites 56k to 4Mbit connections are typical. For intranet applications 10Mbit-100Mbit is common (this bandwidth is shared). So a maximum 10Mbit bandwidth per user was selected for simulation purposes. The bandwidth was limited for each virtual user by the testing tool.

Note that with a bandwidth per user of 10Mbit on a 100Mbit network, no more than 10 users could be supported using their full bandwidth (assuming 100% network efficiency, which Ethernet can’t achieve). However, all the scenarios contain significant “think time” (time between pages) that allows more than 1,000 users to use the 100Mbit bandwidth. Each test was stopped before any indications were given that the throughput capacity had been reach to ensure that our measurements were an accurate gauge of the server’s performance.

Construction of Test Cases

The test case required a servlet that could return Web pages of a specified length referencing a specified number of external resources (images were used in this simulation). The servlet used provided the required functionality hard-coded in the servlet. Its source code is publicly available in the ContainerBenchmark.java file. Once the servlet and necessary resources were installed (via a WAR file), the test tool was used to record the scenarios interactively using the Web browser. In this case Opera 8.01 was used, but which browser is used to record the scenarios should not affect the test. Each scenario was recorded over the duration listed above. The testing tool was configured to simulate an approximately equal share of “think time” between each page, lingering slightly longer on the last page before restarting the test. (See Figure 1-2-3)

Testing Procedure

Test case recordings, virtual user simulation, and data gathering were all managed by the testing tool in this case Web Performance Trainer 2.8, Build 629.”

Performance testing

DETROIT, May 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ —

Compuware Corporation today introduced the new version of its performance testing solution, Compuware QALoad 5.5. This new release extends Compuware’s history of delivering enterprise performance-testing capabilities to organizations by improving tester efficiency through wizard-driven automation and through enabling a collaborative approach to improving application quality.
“QALoad’s new automated parameterization wizard and rules library will dramatically increase productivity for our clients,” said Thomas Poirier, CEO at Persystence, Inc. “The ability to simplify the creation, storage and sharing of rules is a crucial time-saver for difficult-to-automate patterns and could reduce script creation and maintenance by as much as forty or fifty percent.”
Compuware QALoad is an automated load-testing tool for web, Java, .NET, packaged ERP/CRM applications and distributed environments. Compuware QALoad simulates thousands of users performing key business transactions against an application to ensure its performance and scalability prior to deployment. With Compuware QALoad, testers can quickly pinpoint problems, optimize system performance and help ensure successful application deployment.

Borland Software has released an upgraded version of Borland SilkTest(R), the enterprise-class functional testing product. Borland recently acquired Segue Software and added this tool to Borland’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) portfolio. SilkTest 8.0 offers new features designed to help organizations optimize the quality of software by streamlining and automating testing efforts. It also adds support for testing Eclipse-based applications and those applications running on the latest Internet browser and Microsoft .NET 2.0 environments.

From TMCNet

“SilkTest 8.0 provides a full-featured automated functional testing system designed to ensure software meets designated functionality, quality, and reliability requirements. Automated functional testing is a key component of any comprehensive software quality process, enabling enterprises to thoroughly verify application functionality with accuracy, comply with industry and company standards, and streamline this critical but time consuming process.

SilkTest is a member of Borland’s Silk(TM) quality and performance management product line, and will play a role in Borland’s upcoming Lifecycle Quality Management solution, expected to be introduced later this year.

“SilkTest provides a sophisticated system for test planning, development, execution and reporting across multiple platforms, development environments and browsers,” said Erik Frieberg, vice president of product marketing and strategy at Borland. “Its tight integration with Borland’s other test, performance management and requirements management products enables IT teams to improve quality throughout other phases of the development lifecycle. This lifecycle approach aids efforts such as requirements-driven testing and helps customers be more efficient in their existing development and testing processes.” ”