Google’s load testing time tool
From Centernetworks
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how important a role load times and website speed play in search results. Google has announced a new tool to track how Google views your website, ecommerce site or blog from a loading perspective. The tool is available within the Google Labs section of the Google Webmaster Tools service.
The tool is called “Site Performance” and actually displays some interesting information. Google notes, “Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.” The tool shows you how long it takes Google to load your pages and includes the details on total size, number of requests and domain lookups.
Testing for real
From Auto Mobi
Omnitech InfoSolutions, India’s leading business availability and business continuity solutions provider is pleased to announce its participation in EuroSTAR 2009, which is on now in Stockholm, Sweden.
EuroStar 2009 is the most successful and widely acknowledged event with a gathering of more than 1000 testing professionals participating from across the globe. The event in its 17th year has announced ‘Testing for Real, Testing for Now’ as a theme for this year.
Test Driven Development
From Making Good Software
Lots of people confuse “test first methodologies” with TDD, it is very common to listen comments like “TDD is just about writing your tests first”, which are completely wrong, these kind of affirmations are not describing TDD at all, they are talking about test first development.
The main reason for confusing TDD and test first development is its own name: “test driven development”. If someone that doesn’t know about TDD would had to guess based on the name what TDD is, would probably guess that is just a test first methodology. But is not!
TDD as invented by Kent Beck, (who also invented Xtreme programming and Junit), goes beyond that. In the core of TDD there is a process to follow, which makes it already different from a simple test first approach.
Free ALM tools
From Earth Times
TechExcel, Inc., a leading provider of Application Lifecycle Management software, today announced it is offering software developers a free 10-user license for DevSuite, its award-winning suite of ALM tools. The new 10-Users Free Program gives small development teams an excellent, no risk opportunity to experience how the company’s fully-integrated set of enterprise-class tools can help them more efficiently and effectively manage all phases of application development.
BT testing Ribbit
From Blogging Stocks
To protect itself from the eventual attack from Mountain View, BT picked up Ribbit Mobile, and testing is in progress. Ribbit’s technology has some overlap with Google Voice and even beats it with a few capabilities, according to Bloomberg. Ribbit just launched its beta product this month. It allows either the user’s current phone number or a new one from Ribbit — which is no different from Google’s alternative. The product suite is generally the same, with phone- and web-based voicemail retrieval and automatic transcriptions that can be sent by text message or e-mail. For an extra fee, BT’s Ribbit does provide human transcription, though it is free during testing. And, calls can be taken directly from a computer, using a microphone and speakers.
DR testing essentials
The specific situation, defined priorities and the disaster recovery (DR) plan at hand will define how to perform your customer’s DR testing.
Keep in mind that redundancy has a huge impact on the DR exercise. For instance, the effort to rehearse failing over to a continuously updated redundant storage array in a secondary data center is relatively simple; in contrast, having no secondary array to fail over to requires restoring terabytes of data and rehearsing the loss of the data center itself. The DR testing efforts and costs associated with the two scenarios differ greatly, and companies need to do a thorough analysis before deciding whether to invest in redundancy or to pour money into a more elaborate rehearsal.
IBM ALM tools and cloud computing
From Ovum
There is little surprise in Rational’s first major release of tooling for the cloud. IBM held a series of technical preview announcements last June concerning the Software Group’s overall cloud computing strategy. The bulk of the offerings were made available in a limited release to select clients through the summer.
The releases, which fall under the umbrella brand IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing (SDS), cover planning, team collaboration, and testing. They largely map to Ovum’s recommendations regarding software development in the cloud, encompassing enterprise architecture planning, software asset management, workflow collaboration, and quality assurance. The Ovum Report ALM and SaaS: should developers get their heads in the cloud? found that communications-focused or highly variable compute-intensive tasks were best suited for cloud consumption because of the ability of cloud-based tools to address wide audiences.
Usability testing and the environment
From Earth Times
The average usability testing project leaves a footprint of approximately 250 kilograms, or 0.25 a tonne of CO2. That may not seem much but that is close to amount of CO2 emission as a 3 hour flight.
Usability testing is universally seen as the best way to improve a system’s ease and satisfaction of use. If one usability test itself emits the equivalent of a 3 hour flight, there clearly are considerable gains to be made!
Micro Focus expecting testing business to boom
From Nasdaq
LONDON -(Dow Jones)- U.K. business software company Micro Focus said it expects first-half revenue and earnings to be up sharply from a year ago, and that its two recent acquisitions have performed ahead of expectations.
Micro Focus provides software and consultancy services to help clients update legacy IT platforms, a less-costly solution than buying new systems, particularly for firms looking to save costs due to the economic downturn.
Earlier this year, Micro Focus bought U.S.-based Borland Corp. and Compuware Corp.’s testing and automated software quality business, giving the company a footprint in software testing which ensures that software works properly when it is in development.
LSE postpones testing Baikal
From Computing
London Stock Exchange (LSE) is delaying the launch of its dark pool facility Baikal as the bourse continues talks with Turquoise over a possible acquisition. The dark pool facility, which allows traders to execute shares without displaying the pre-trade prices to rivals, could potentially be folded into Turquoise if the acquisition goes ahead.
It was reported that the bourse has stopped short of testing Baikal with clients as it was concerned it would anger customers if further changes are required following a possible merger.
Using technology provided in partnership with specialist supplier Fidessa and financial services giant BNP Paribas, Baikal is expected to provide a “one-stop shop for navigating fragmented liquidity across Europe” .
