New usability testing lab
From Market Watch
Open Solutions Inc.(R), a leading provider of software to the financial services industry, has announced the opening of its new Enterprise Usability Lab, a state-of-the-art facility the company will employ to conduct usability tests on existing and new products.
The new lab replicates the environment in which an individual uses a particular product and utilizes Morae(R) software to record all aspects of the individual’s experience while using the product: keystrokes, clickstream, audio and video. Those recordings are then synchronized into a single file and studied to determine, among other things, how simple, convenient and easily mastered the product is by the end-user.
Usability testing can be conducted on existing products and at key points throughout the creation of a new product including: during and after the design process, after it’s been deployed and when it’s deployed in a different cultural environment.
Test Week and the Test Conference
From Market Watch
International Test Conference, the highlight of the annual Test Week activities and the leading forum for electronics test technology, promises to engage and stimulate attendees from the test and design community with its technical program and activities when the doors open at the 39th annual ITC. Test Week 2008 runs from October 26 – October 31 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.
ITC, the cornerstone of the Test Week event, is known worldwide for the strength of its technical program, which attracts many top researchers and industry experts who choose ITC to present the results of their work. Offerings throughout the week incorporate a wide variety of technical activities targeted at test and design theoreticians and practitioners, including: formal paper sessions, tutorials, panel sessions, lecture series sessions, advanced industrial practices sessions, a poster session, workshops, commercial exhibits and a host of professional fringe meetings. Taken together, these activities provide a week-long educational experience that will benefit people new to testing and experts.
A sort of testing story about the London 2012 olympics
From Reuters
Olympics minister Tessa Jowell has commissioned a viability test on the proposed equestrian venue at Greenwich Park, the shooting facilities at the Royal Artillery Barracks, Woolwich and the basketball venue on the main Olympic Park.
“We have commissioned KPMG to do a report on the equestrian, shooting and basketball venues, looking at whether the Olympic experience and the legacy they will provide represents value for money,” Jowell said.
“When you take the costs for these venues, it seems like a lot of money to a lot of people. It is a sort of testing-to-destruction to see whether that spending can be justified.”
London Olympics WAN to be supplied by Nortel
From One Stop Click
Free managed WAN internet connectivity remains a long way off, according to one expert.
Businesses around the world would appreciate access to managed WAN services free of charge but the likelihood of such a situation emerging in the near future is slim indeed, Steve Broadhead from Broadband-Testing Labs maintains.
He told ComputerWeekly recently he recalled IT experts stating with confidence that free managed WAN would be widespread before the end 1998 before noting the claim still does not apply a decade on. Mr Broadhead went on to suggest that rather than relying on the supply of managed WAN free of charge, businesses are looking for services which make full use of the broadband width available to them.
Meanwhile, it was recently announced that the North American telecoms giant Nortel is to supply the London Olympics in 2012 with the latest managed WAN technology available.
IBM releases open source software for Linux-based Supercomputer
From Zdnet
IBM has released its first certified open-source software for Linux-based supercomputers, marking the tenth anniversary of its involvement with Linux.
Released at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday, the IBM HPC Open Software Stack is intended to ease the deployment of supercomputing clusters — in particular hybrid clusters that combine different processor types.
Releasing the software as open source allows the development community to take part in adding and testing new features, which could be important in the rapidly changing supercomputer field, IBM said.
The software is available immediately from a software repository run by the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
WAN testing
From CRN
With that in mind, the CRN Test Center examined three offerings aimed at making WANs more efficient—so traffic can move and work can get done. While a number of WAN optimization appliance vendors declined to provide products for us to review comparatively against their peers, there were a couple of vendors that made their software-based WAN products available, as did an open-source community that is working on a Linux-based solution.
Our methodology was straightforward: Software was installed on a simulated WAN and examined for ease of deployment and use, performance, features and cost. In the performance testing phase, files were transferred between endpoints on a WAN both with and without the optimization software to gauge whether it improved transfer performance.
Debugging and testing multiprocessors
From EE Times
A survey performed by Freescale and Virtutech at the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2008 indicated that the top issues in multicore software development were:
- lack of determinism and repeatability of bugs
- inability to stop an entire system to debug software
- getting existing software to run on multicore systems;
- inadequate visibility of all states in an embedded system (e.g., system-on-chip, board and rack).
The survey indicated that performance was less a problem for software development, yet the primary reason for choosing a multicore processor.
CMMI (Cadaver and Mathematical Modelling Integration)
From Chron.com
Personnel working under contract for NASA used cadavers in tests to develop landing systems, spacesuits and seats in the new Orion moonship, space agency officials said Friday.
Three human bodies were used in the tests at Ohio State University Medical Center last summer and fall.
The tests provided the space agency’s safety experts and engineers assessments of the forces that astronauts are expected to experience when the new spacecraft descends to Earth by parachute.
Cadavers, examined before and after the testing, offer insights into the forces on internal organs and the spinal cord that cannot be accurately obtained using automotive crash-test dummies and computer models.
Stress testing toolkit
From Market Watch
Under the guidance of Sanjay Gupta, RiskTech’s North America Head, the Company has developed a stress testing toolkit and service that can be quickly implemented in banks. This tool will aid the bank’s senior management, risk managers and portfolio managers to conduct stress test on the bank’s portfolios. It also allows them to define their own scenarios and develop heat maps of their portfolios and conduct simulations.
The stress testing toolkit encompasses experience at top 20 global institutions and work at big four accounting institutions. It is very intuitive, easy to learn and has a very clean Excel interface. It can be easily customized and tailored to clients’ needs based on their internal rating systems or agency rated portfolios. It can also work with different recovery rate assumptions.
“Asset Quality, predicting provisions and loan loss reserves has assumed paramount importance in the task lists of CEOs, CFOs and CROs of the all the banks,” commented Sanjay Gupta, Head of RiskTech – North America. “As the credit quality is deteriorating and the market braces itself for more downgrades and defaults, all the bankers need an independent solution for stress testing their portfolios to better quantify loan loss reserves and impairments.”
Tests show London has fastest broadband
From IDG.NO
Web users in London can enjoy faster broadband download speeds than anywhere else in the U.K. Indeed, Londoners can enjoy broadband internet nearly twice as fast as those in Wales and Northern Ireland, a survey has revealed.
thinkbroadband.com recorded average speeds across 12 U.K. regions by testing more than 138,000 connections. You can test your own broadband internet connection right now using PC Advisor’s own independent Broadband Speed Checker.
In London the average download speed was 4,460kbps, compared with 2,258kbps in Northern Ireland and 2,587kbps in Wales.
London software testing news UK 