Testing, Start-up, Mobile World ....

Twitter allowed “Grouping” of People I Follow

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:16:00 +0000

Wahoo !!!! I am happy ! Very happy !

I wrote an article http://mytestingideas.blogspot.com/2009/10/twitter-allowing-followers-to-be.html on 06th October about Twitter having a feature to allow “grouping” of people I would like to show my tweets to and groping the people I follow. And it is out ! :)

The have implemented one part of the feature request. I am happy, looks like someone is listening. :)

Customize Wait Statement in QTP

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:03:00 +0000

In QTP, it’s good to use customize Wait statements rather than using Sync property of Browser. The way test case is written in QTP is perform some action and wait for the result to verify. And these results are mostly the response from the server which results in loading new page. Below is a function which solves this problem and can be easily used and improves the readability of the script.

Function Wait_For_PageLoad(BrowsName,PageName)

    Browser(BrowsName).Sync
    Browser(BrowsName).Page(PageName).Sync
    Browser(BrowsName).Page(PageName).WaitProperty "visible",true,10000

End Function

Testing SOA based Application

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:37:00 +0000

What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?

SOA is a method for delivering complex business software with increased flexibility through loosely coupled services
Relies on Service orientation as its fundamental design principle
SOA implementations are a combination of web components, mid-tier components, as well as back-end and legacy systems
Enterprises are using SOA to integrate disparate systems into cohesive business processes by reusing in-tact systems and leveraging messaging and integration.
SOAs have allowed organizations to flexibly integrate new and existing components as services in a business workflow

Challenges in SOA Testing

Testing loosely coupled services.
Heterogeneous computing environment
Bug isolation due to multiple layers
Testing asynchronous nature of application

Solution to the SOA based Testing

Thorough component level testing of services before integration
Service Integration Testing
Testing from multiple Point of View (Service Provider, Service Consumer, Service Registry)
End to End system testing
Tool based testing and automation

SOA Testing Lifecycle

Best Practices

SOA requires changes in Testing Methods and life cycle.
– Test Services in Isolation
– Test earlier in the life cycle
SOA requires testing from multiple perspectives.
SOA requires Testing along multiple dimensions.
    – Test functionality
    – Test for Interoperability and compliance to standards
    – Test for Security
    – Test for Performance
SOA requires specialized testing skills
    – Testing exclusively through GUI is insufficient
    – Test using Test Harnesses to invoke services directly
    – Requires both Technical and Business expertise

Twitter allowing “Followers” to be Grouped ???

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:24:00 +0000

I am not in US! I don’t use Face book, Twitter, MySpace more than Google when i am online. Of late I started using Twitter and currently I am Following :42 & Followers: 32

And a total of 83 tweets. Not good but not very bad also. Once in a day I do log into Twitter account either to tweet or read updates from the others.

But I realized, Twitter is such a plain application. I mean just simple. You Follow <==> Some one Follows you ==> You Tweet. That’s it. Damn Simple. So I have friends who follows me, Colleagues and outside world. There are some updates which I want to share with my friends only and not with Outside World or vice versa. Then I realized that Twitter should actually allow me to Group Users I follow and allow me to choose my updates to share with certain groups. Wouldn’t it be nice. Yeah I feel so, I don’t know about you.

Well I have just sent an email about this to Senior Product Manager in Twitter and hoping he may consider it. Let’s see what happens.

Retrieving all Dropdown values in VBScript

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:56:00 +0000

I will be pushing some VBScript functions which will help QTP automation testers. I will be randomly selecting web controls and a problem statement with that. Today’s control is drop down box and I will be writing a function which will read all the values in the drop down.

Function GetAllValuesOfDropDown(BrowserName,PageName, DropDownName)
   If Browser(BrowserName).Page(PageName).WebList(DropDownName).Exist Then
        If Browser(BrowserName).Page(PageName).WebList(DropDownName).GetROProperty("disabled") = False Then
       DropDownValues = Browser(BrowserName).Page(PageName).WebList(DropDownName).GetROProperty("all items")
            GetAllValuesOfDropDown= DropDownValues
        else
            GetAllValuesOfDropDown= False
        End If
   else
        GetAllValuesOfDropDown= False
   End If
End Function

This will also help me revise my concepts. :)

Happy Birth Day Google !!!

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:55:00 +0000

Notice the spelling of Google. It’s the Google’s 11th birthday !!!

At first I thought, it’s typo; but then pointing the mouse shows 11th Birthday. :)

Nice…

Making cells mandatory in Excel

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:58:00 +0000

Recently I read some article in Martin Flower’s blog where he is pointing to “Excel” as the most popular programming language. Indeed it is ! I very much agree with that. It’s just a powerful tool which allows one a freedom of implementation in VBScript.

I am just sharing my experience with Excel where I had to make some cells mandatory as a part of filling a form. Hope you will be benefited.

Option Explicit
Dim Mandatory As Range

Private Sub Worksheet_SelectionChange(ByVal Target As Excel.Range)
If Target.Cells.Count > 1 Then Exit Sub

Select Case Target.Address
Case "$A$5", "$A$10", "$A$15", "$A$20", "$A$25", "$A$30"
Set Mandatory = Target
Case Else
If Not Mandatory Is Nothing Then
If Mandatory = "" Then
Mandatory.Select
MsgBox "You cannot leave this cell blank"
End If
End If
End Select

End Sub

The above macro will make the cells A5,A10,… mandatory and pressing TAB will prompt user a message “You cannot leave this cell blank” and the focus will remain in the cell.

In case of any issues do drop in a comment or mail to me.

Reading an Excel in VBScript

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Below is a piece of code which can be used to read excel sheet and the values in the row or column.

Option Explicit

Dim myExcel,strExcelPath,objSheet
Dim intRow,strRow2Col1,strRow2Col2

Set myExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
strExcelPath = "C:\Book2.xls"

myExcel.WorkBooks.Open strExcelPath
Set objSheet = myExcel.ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets(1)

'Assuming that the first row will contain the name of the column
intRow = 2
Do While objSheet.Cells(intRow, 1).Value <> ""
    strRow2Col1 = objSheet.Cells(intRow, 1).Value
    strRow2Col2 = objSheet.Cells(intRow, 2).Value
'Increment the control to the next row
    intRow = intRow + 1
Loop

myExcel.ActiveWorkbook.Close
myExcel.Application.Quit

Mobile Road Show from 1.0 to Mobile 2.0

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:36:00 +0000

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Conquering the world of Mobile Advertisement

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:58:00 +0000

In the present era we have a deep presence of mobile & internet in our life. People are driven by socio-emotional need to get connected with their friends, families, information and entertainment. As per the latest research, people are using their mobile to access internet as much as they use traditional web. Apart from all this, we would have hardly noticed but mobile phones are intensely personal devices which we carry with us almost everywhere. As a result, it is hard-to-resist medium for advertisers and proves to be the most intrusive form of marketing.

Mobile Services typically involve two big players: Carrier & End User. Carriers generally weigh different strategies to approach the market and look for different user segments. But we are witnessing the third player coming into picture: Advertiser.

If we try understanding the entire situation, it is carrier which is interfacing both user & advertiser and they have to do the balancing act between the two. The biggest risk taken by a carrier is that there is a high potential for turning off prospective customers. Though there is a significant challenge involved in creating awareness among the advertisers about the mobile domain, there are also some benefits which carriers could offer to them.

Customer Analysis has been and will be one of the prime challenges for the advertising. Carriers have the advantage that they know who the subscribers are. They can track which web pages the customers land on. A little bit of data mining on the user and their mobile communication usage can result in a good data which could be very useful for the advertisers. One of the biggest advantages of mobile devices is that they allow instant reach which in turn gives mobile advertisement its effectiveness. It also helps in increasing awareness and allows user to send a quick response by messaging, calling or downloading.

The general perception of a user about ads is that they are irrelevant, unwanted, uncontrolled and above all spam. However a carrier can prove that the mobile advertising is pretty different from the above.

Carriers can allow users to take control and opt themselves for ads. It should be left at their choice what ads they want to receive in addition to the kind of ads. This empowers user and at the same time encourage them to mobile advertising service.

Carriers can provide a self service portal to user where in they can fill in their personal interest and details. This will help carrier to ensure that the mobile ads and promotions are catered to a section a user based on their choices and are more relevant.

In the entire business of mobile advertisement, carrier plays a major role of bridging the gap between the user and the advertiser. They make advertisements more valuable, measurable and targeted.
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Scheduling Google Search

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 04:56:00 +0000

Scheduling Google Search and getting the results on your Mobile.

I was reading an article on Tech Crunch about Google and I got an idea. If it is Google it has to be Search. If I see the web site I see it perfect. There is nothing a person would want ; a simple User Interface with text box and button. But what if I don’t have access to internet tomorrow just in case if I am traveling or not at my laptop or not having access to internet in but I know that I will need it to search something. For example when I am in Mysore Road (Let's say Wonder La) and I might be looking for some information on the good restaurants around. And I saw myself imagining the Google page with a “Schedule” button which allows me scheduling the search in future (may be 2-3 days in future) and not only this but also delivering the top 10 or 15 search result onto my cell phone. This sounds cool I suppose.

Now this feature will really be good and handy but I also think how many users will be like me needing Google Search at a real weird time? :)

Looks like it’s going to rain!

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:08:00 +0000

Title may sound weird to many of you but I could not get any suitable title than this. This line is one among the many dialogues which Spartan king speaks in movie 300. I watch this movie on almost every weekend (I have this movie stored on my laptop HD). Well this blog is no where related to 300.
This blog is about cloud computing. What is cloud computing? Why cloud computing will make it real big?
What is cloud computing? Cloud refers to the internet and computing refers to IT related services. When computing services are available on cloud, same is referred as cloud computing. In IT layman’s word it is like availability of virtual servers for internet. In academics we learn about many concepts like Grid computing, Cluster computing etc… but let’s not confuse those concepts with cloud computing. Cloud computing is not at all grid computing or cluster computing.
Why cloud computing will make it real big? Let’s discuss few reasons why cloud computing will make it real big.

1. Cutting down fixed cost investment: Generally for building any large scale system we need to invest a huge amount in real estate, machine hardware and operational support. But due to the advent of cloud computing there is no fixed cost.

2. Just-in-time Scalability: We heard of just-in-time compilers but now we will witness just-in-time infrastructures where in your system scales as your application grows. This happens by deploying the applications in cloud which allows dynamic capacity management and you need not worry for scaling of your application.

3. Efficient Infrastructure utilization: Cloud computing also allows the best infrastructure utilization. Cloud architectures manager resources more effectively and efficiently because application request and relinquish resources based on what they need (that is on demand supply).

4. Speed up Processing time: It also provides a way to speed up your application processing because parallelization is one of the underlying ideas of cloud computing. To complete a job which is submitted to server, it would be possible to spawn 500 instances to process the same job in a much lesser time.

There are many more reasons which we can find on internet why cloud computing will make it real big. One article which really impressed me to write this blog was “Cloud Architectures” by Amazon Web Services. I wish someday I will be doing web service testing for those guys… :)

Narrowing down Usability Testing

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 10:38:00 +0000

Today we are witnessing a flood of mobile devices and applications which are customized to be displayed on these hand held devices. So in this situation device testing is critical to your business.

Let’s analyze the reason for this:
•Sharp increase in the count of people accessing Internet from Mobile
•Platform used to access site is less predictable when using mobile phones. Computers differ in terms of OS and browser where as the difference between mobile phones and PDAs is wide.
•People have less experience using mobile to go online than computers.

The next big hurdle is how we narrow down our choices for mobile phones and PDA when we have hundreds of them around us. Some of the prominent ways in which mobile devices differs are:
•Screen Size (Large Vs. Small)
•Screen Layout (Landscape Vs. Portrait)
•Pointer or Input Devices Used (Stylus / Numeric Keypad / QWERTY Keypad)

Ideally testing should be done with maximum number of devices so as to include a wide range. But testing with every device is not possible. So we can narrow down the choices of devices based on some factors:
•Popular Mobile Phones in that Geography
•Audience of the site. Certain age group of audience tends to prefer particular types of phones e.g. phones with large screens to support easy online access.
•Targeting Phone families that offer similar UX

So this basically addresses questions like why we need to do Usability Testing and narrowing it down to how do we pick the devices for the same.

Social Network? Are we seeing too much of it???

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:21:00 +0000

I was just going through some feeds in Google Reader where I saw the heading "Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It’s A Social Network!". Finally Microsoft ventured into Social Networking. I am not a very good researcher on Internet but yes a vivid reader for sure. I have 1 question:

1.Are we seeing too much of Social Networking Site?

My point on the first question, yes I think we are seeing a too much of it. To name a few market owners Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, hi5, MySpace, Orkut, Tagged and the list goes on… Too much right! Yeah at least I would say that. I remember I had an account in hi5 which I stopped using, probably account would have got deleted by now. Then I created an account in Orkut, was tired at some point of time and deleted that account and then again I created one as most of the friends are there :). Recently I created an account in LinkedIn found it’s good and very professional unlike Orkut. Then heard of MySpace and created there too. Now the problem which surfaced was how frequently I should check all these account, mapping between friends and these networks and finally remembering the id and password of each of them :). It was too tiring. So I gave up MySpace and focused only on Orkut and LinkedIn.

Now an idea which is coming in my mind is how about creating a web site to control all of my account. Something like Google Reader where in I add those sites and I will get all the updates from my friends, all the scraps from my friends etc… This idea sounds good. But since I am from a testing background I am not sure if this is technically feasible??? But may be in future when the web moves from 2.0 to 3.0 or 4.0 or say X.0 we may get to see this type of an application.
One more thing, I think this idea will be very popular among people in west than here in India just a prediction of mine. But first let’s hope some startup get this idea and our tech gods (Venture Capitalists) fund it.

Orkut, Facebook, Myspace all on one web page...

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:17:00 +0000

Social networking Sites – All in one site

Yesterday when I was checking my Orkut account and then my Face book account (Fortunately I am not using Myspace or Linked In), a thought came to my mind; what if a web site which allows me a single sign in to all my account (Orkut & Face book here) and launch the 2 web site side by side. This will give me the facility to have single web page and will minimize my efforts like opening a new tab, typing in my id and password etc.... If you have used blogger, then it will make sense to understand my concept. The web page should be similar to blogger where in you can re-arrange the frames (Which will contain Orkut, Facebook etc...)them as per your wish. We can have some features like if you write some scrap in one scrap book then you get by default the same scrap in other scrap book. Also the host web page may offer you something like finding friends who are there in Orkut and not in Face book or vice versa.

I don’t know if technically it is feasible or not :) , but I think that in future we may get to see a web page like this because almost all of us have more than 1 account in social networking site and with the popularity of these sites we often get drifted to create a new one and try them. So probably it will be very difficult to visit each of them daily and which may push some of our developer bros to create it... I would love to test it being a tester or could suggest some ideas to make it more rich ... :)

Mobile Testing Start-ups

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 07:46:00 +0000

Few days back I started reading blogs (related to mobiles) and started digging more into stuffs which are related to mobile market and I found it really interesting. One area which I find very promising is “Testing mobile apps”. But the challenges are many. Almost every 6 months or may be even less handset makers are coming with new mobile OS. Take the example of Google which brought “Android”, Apple’s Iphone came with its own OS, Palm OS announced ALP 3.0. So it’s like the basic system is not stable or in other words it’s undergoing a lot of change unlike computers where in we have a concept of new version releases. But even the PC OS version is not that frequent as we have in the case of Mobile phone OS. So the question is “can we see that market to be stable?” Will the big giants like Google, Apple, Nokia etc. will be in a position to put a check on this? If we analyze it further, we can actually see a possibility of “start-ups” coming into picture which can actually capture the market of “Mobile Testing”.

Google, Google and Google…

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:01:00 +0000

G1- The next big thing in mobile market is not yet in market but ask any techie he will list down almost all the features of it. I have not seen G1 but have read a lot on many web sites, reviews about it. To tell you in brief G1 is loaded with Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail with Contacts, Calendar, Google Talk and YouTube.

After proving its mettle in World Wide Web from product like Google Search, Gmail, Orkut etc, it is now trying to capture the fastest growing market of “Telecom World” which grew from 1.6 billion in September 2007 to 5.1 billion in September 2008 [Source: AdMob Mobile Metrics Report]. What I can see around in near future is Google, Google and Google everywhere. Buying mobile OS start-up “Android” and then venturing into mobile market to tap the mobile business is one of the most calculated step of Google which hint about the way Google want to be market leader. Today evening when I was going through “Read Write Web” site, BlogRovr indicated a new blog update about Google’s acquisition of new Blog site “TNC” which is more popular than Google’s Blogger in Korea. The sole reason of acquisition was making its presence felt in Korea.

New Features in Task ReportingTool

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:57:00 +0000

This is how the application new UI looks like....

After looking into the previous application, I though like I should put some more feature to make it more easy and attractive to use. Feature enhancements which are done:
1. Option of Selecting a single day
2. Option of providing a keyword to search your sent mail items.
3. Ready to send mail

A checkbox has been provided to select the option of pulling out task report for a single day. When the checkbox is checked, app will also draft a mail for you, where in you have just have to type the recipients name and press Ctrl+S.

A textbox has been provided for the user to enter the keyword for searching sent mail items.If nothing is entered, by default the sent items will be searched on the keyword "status".

My First C# Application :)

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:33:00 +0000

This is one of my interesting projects I have ever worked and really enjoyed it to core. I was given the task to create an application which generates a report file taking input from mailbox task, meeting and sent items (based on some keywords in subject line). I found it very interesting and challenging too coz I being the tester first time I was feeling that I am doing some task of development which I always wanted to do. :)

Working with “Outlook Mailbox” is really fun. Problem was how to read tasks and meeting/appointment and create a daily report for the same. The idea of creating this document is to share my excitement and coming up with this document to help someone to give them an insight into how to work in C# to retrieve all items from mailbox. This doc will help to integrate Outlook with Visual Studio with C# language.

Technical Info: To start with we need to add the Microsoft Outlook 12.0 Outlook Library reference to the project. Once we add the reference to our project the Microsft.Office.Core and Outlook assemblies will be added.
Outlook uses MAPI folders to keep track of your e-mail messages, contacts, appointments, tasks and notes. Outlook keeps these files in one of two places, depending on the type of e-mail server you use. Your MAPI file is either in a personal storage folder (.pst) on your hard disk drive or in a mailbox located on the server, if you are using Outlook with Microsoft Exchange server.

Brief about Application: The snapshot of the application is shown below. This application scans the mailbox for meeting request, tasks and sent mails based on “Status” keyword. The application has the functionality of pulling the report from 1st day of week i.e. Monday to the day selected from the calendar control. Application provides the option of saving the report generated in the .txt file in the folder where application is installed. “Open File” button opens the text file for any modifications (if required). It also provides the option of pulling the report for a single day by selecting the checkbox “Single Day” and opens the mail (ready to send) with the body as the report pulled. Just type in the recipients and send it!:)

How to select a web service testing tool?

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:36:00 +0000

Well this is the first and foremost question which comes to mind when we have a web service testing project. I have just tried to put down my opinion about how to select a tool. There are two things which I will expect from a test tool:

1. Tool which will allow stand alone testing of web services
2. Tool which can be used as a test harness to create different suites of functional and regression test cases.

There are other factors also which influence the selection of tool. I would like to prioritize them like this:

1. Tool allows you to create test cases and Test case Management.
2. Tool allows integration with other frameworks or applications.
3. A good result reporting format.
4. Tool supporting different platforms.
5. Tool should be easy to learn.

XML Handling Tips in C#

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:29:00 +0000

The XML handling in C# believe me is one of the tricky task.

Sometimes the way we read one of the XML will not work out for the other and will throw some exception and believe me that when you see that the same code works in one program and not the other then trust me you just feel like yelling at Visual Studio. Many times the code I write for one XML file do not works for the other and trust me that really frustrates… J

In this post I will brief about XML loading and how to query XML for 2 most frequently used requirements:

1. Getting a particular node.

2. Getting a particular node along with its child nodes.

So XML handling starts with loading the XML Document.

XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();

xDoc.Load(@"C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\Desktop\\Test Sprint\\URL_Config\\Test.xml");

Now the problem starts after loading the document. The problem is with the namespace. Sometimes the document gets loaded properly and sometimes does not. So we need to create a namespace in that document (xDoc here).

XmlNamespaceManager nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xdoc.NameTable);

nsmgr.AddNamespace("sm", "http://tempuri.org");

Getting a particular node:

To get a particular node we can use the “GetElementsByTagName” method. This method returns the list of nodes having the same tag name as specified.

XmlNodeList categorynodeList;

categorynodeList = xDoc.GetElementsByTagName("Category");

Getting a particular node along with its child nodes:

But to get the list of nodes along with child nodes we need to use bit complex xquery.

XmlNodeList nodeList;

nodeList = root.SelectNodes("//sm:Feed/sm:Item", nsmgr);

It requires one to think smartly of the trees present and how to query to get the node list. There are 2 ways of getting the node list.

1. Using the "GetElementsByTagName” method .

2. Using the “SelectNodes” method.

How to do Web Service Testing ????

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:43:00 +0000

Recently I have completed a project on Web Service Testing. Till now I have executed around 10 -12 projects as a Sr. Software Development Engineer in Test but never found any project which is more challenging and interesting when it comes to web service testing.

The entire blog is written into 3 sections:

1. What is Web Service

2. Scope of Testing Web Service

3. Approach to test a web service

What is a web service…

Few months back in a discussion I came across the word “SOA”. I was completely unaware of the word “SOA”; what it is ; how it helps; is it a standard like IEEE etc…

But after the WS testing project, I came to know about SOA. This definition is taken from Wikipedia which I found is the most relevant among the web search I did for defining SOA.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software architecture where functionality is grouped around business processes and packaged as interoperable services.

SOA actually aims at providing a loose coupling of services which underlie applications. It separates functions into different services which are available over a network and can be re-used.

In simple words web services are like an API available over internet to be re-used. So a web service is a system which sits somewhere on a network and all it ever does is service specific requests from clients.

Scope of Testing Web Service…

We can divide web services into 2 categories: one which is used over internet and the one which is used over intranet. The challenging part in web service testing is that they don’t have UI. They are completely UI-less. So this pose a problem that manual testing of web service is going to be a tedious job. But trust me if you are aware of programming and have done some programming then it is going to be the most interesting project. So the foremost condition for web service testing is that one should know programming and have good programming skills.

So the first question which comes to mind is what all I can do in the testing of web services. We can do both Functional Testing & Non Functional Testing. Functional testing will do the data verification part and the non functional testing will look into the response time, scalability issues and performance issues.

Approach to test a web service…

All the web services will either interact with XML as a data source or any database. So functional testing will include providing various input combination and verifying the output result with the source data.

Non Functional Testing will include load and stress testing of the web services. The idea behind the load/stress testing is to figure out how the web service scales as the number of request (clients) accessing it increases. So there are few questions which we need to answer while doing non functional testing like if we double the number of users, do response times stay the same? If we double the number of servers running your web service, does its capacity double?

There are various testing tools available in the market like ANTS, AdventNet QEngine which can be used.

But I prefer using C# and VS 2005 to do the functional testing of web services. NUnit Framework can be used to create test case and execute it . But one has to be good in programming and understand the structure of NUnit.

Till Then ...Bye Good Night ....

Performance Testing

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:35:00 +0000

Whenever we hear the word ‘performance testing’ the very first thing which comes to the mind is bombarding the server with more than 100 or sometime 1000 request at a time.
But as per my understanding (which is based on after going through lots of research paper and training), performance testing is nothing but real-time simulation of scenarios on a server.
Let’s take an example of doing performance testing of a Mailbox Server. So ideally a naive person who only knows about general testing or rather has done only functional testing will think of bombarding the server by creating some 1000 mail request and watching the time for each request to be successful. But this conception is totally wrong.
Before starting any performance testing we need to know the typical usage scenario or the functionality of the Application under Test (AUT) to stretch it. This is known as creating performance scenario.
So to test a mailbox server, we should have some scenarios. Let’s think of some scenario in a practical world. Let’s say it’s a working day in office and it is Monday. So ideally a company with 401 employees with hierarchy as mentioned below:
Sr. Dev Engineerà Dev Engineer (150) àAssociate Engineer (100) General Manager (5)àProject Manager (20)àDev Lead (50)à(75) Director(1)à
Let’s assume that
• 75 % (comes to 75) of the Associate Engineer report at 10’o clock
• 50 % (comes to 75) of Dev Engineer report at 10 o clock
• 30 % (comes to 22) Sr. Dev Engineer reports at 10 o clock
• 50 % (comes to 25) Dev Lead report at 10 o clock
• 75% (comes to 15) Project Manager report at 10 o clock
come report at 10 o clock (comes to 6)J• Assuming all the big wigs
So ideally on Monday morning, we have 162 persons out of 401 persons logging into their system at 10 o clock. So instead of bombarding the server with 401 mail request we arrived at a number 162 which is more close to the realistic use. Now assuming that almost all 40% person people in the company excluding PM and Dev Lead will send a “Good Morning” mail to almost 4-5 person (This number is just an assumption and could be changed). So the number comes to (40% of 162) * 5 =324.
So we have arrived at a number for one scenario. Similarly we can derive for other scenarios. Below shown is one of the profile charts which could be used for creating scenarios.
Week Day 10 -11 AM 11-12 PM 12 -01 PM 01 - 02 PM 02 - 03 PM 03 -04 PM 04 -05 PM
Monday 324
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

So this is how we create a profile/scenario for performance testing. Once we are done with creating the scenario and arriving at the number, we can record a scenario and can play it for the above mentioned virtual users.