Performance testing in Java development
From InfoQ
In a challenging economy, Java developers have limited resources but face higher expectations to turn out better performing code—and do it faster. Trimmed budgets mean smaller teams. In addition, the market demands shortened development cycles.
This document presents a performance testing strategy that can help you achieve more with less. It describes the importance of granular testing and proposes strategies for writing granular tests. Next, the document identifies the aspects of an application that you need to test, including both code and memory issues such as detecting both memory leaks as well as object cycling.
Real automated testing
From Information Week
Whatever buttons users can press, whatever values they can enter, we can see and do with automation. But applying inputs is only the first part of manual testing. Human testers can see subtle variations that lead them to say “that’s a bug.” This is the primary limiting aspect of automation. Programs aren’t good at seeing output and processing behaviour. They can see crashes. But they can’t notice major bugs like navigating to the wrong page or rendering an image incorrectly.
Pen testing tool
From Secuobs
A Penetration Testing tool intended to find vulnerabilities in Web Pages especially Buffer Overflow and XSS Firefuzzer is expected to perform black-box scans over the web pages. It will target the web page URL which is passed as an argument via command line and will mark the textboxes within the HTML forms to inject unacceptable data. Then, FireFuzzer will inject random textual data and submit the forms to see whether Exceptions are generated.
New release of Parasoft SOA
From Smartdevtools
Parasoft Corporation, leading provider of automated solutions that improve software quality and the development process, have announced the new release of Parasoft’s SOAtest, a full-life-cycle quality platform for ensuring secure, reliable, compliant business processes and understanding how tests pass through heterogeneous systems. It was built from the ground up to prevent errors involving the integrated components—as well as reduce the complexity of testing in today’s distributed, heterogeneous environments. Parasoft SOAtest continuously validates all critical aspects of complex transactions which may extend through web interfaces, back-end services, ESBs, databases, and everything in between.
“With much greater pressure to increase productivity throughout the SDLC, clients have depended on Parasoft SOAtest to bolster quality for their business applications,” said Wayne Ariola, VP of Strategy for Parasoft Corporation. “Doing more with fewer resources has always been a challenge, yet today’s economy has distinctly highlighted many counter-productive business practices used in testing. Parasoft SOAtest’s main goal is to produce reliable, reusable test artifacts that alert users when changes impact the quality of business applications.”
Checking versus Testing
From Silicon India
The long drawn out debate on what a company should opt for, automated testing or manual testing, is finally cut short by Michael Bolton, Founding Partner of DevelopSense, while speaking at the 9th Annual International Software Testing Conference. He strongly opposed the process of testing by machines.
Bolton says that there is a huge difference between checking and testing. Checking is a process of confirming and verifying and can be done by machines. Testing, on the other hand, is an activity that requires humans to perform. “We test not only for repeatability, but also for adaptability, value and threats to the value,” Bolton added. A machine lacks emotions and hence will only do what we program it to do.
White box testing
From Search Security
White box testing is also called structural testing and static analysis. The source code — or a compiled binary of it — is assessed from an insider’s view for security vulnerabilities and coding flaws. White box testing is commonly used early in the development process because it can be applied effectively while the code and modules are still being created.
With white box testing, developers can install plug-ins into their integrated development environment (IDE) of choice and catch semantic coding errors even before the code is checked-in or compiled. Think of this kind of analysis like a spell checker; it’s great for checking many potential mistakes early in the process, but it’s not a replacement for a proficient editor. This is due, in part, to the fact that software vulnerabilities are not semantic.
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.
Mobile device testing
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.
London software testing news UK 