Automated software quality (the process of having software test other software in an unattended fashion) has become a key player in the continued rollout of agile development processes whose target is “better software, faster.” Technical articles, open-source utilities, and licensed software solutions abound for desktop and server operating systems. But, what about classic System i… Continue reading Using Modern Automated Testing Tools to Verify Mainframe and Midrange Batch Functions
Year: 2015
Finding the Root Cause of a .Net Application Memory Leak
Overview High memory use in a .Net application is usually the result of Common Language Runtime (CLR) objects growing in size continuously. When the application memory use grows to over 1.4GB in size, the next time the application tries to “New” an object it will hit a CLR exception of type System.OutOfMemoryException causing the application to crash. The CLR memory is… Continue reading Finding the Root Cause of a .Net Application Memory Leak
Testing Peeple and Other Controversial Apps
Have you heard of Peeple? It’s a newly announced app that is described as “Yelp for people.” This post is not meant to pass judgement on the idea but simply to spit ball how you could test an app so tied to personality, judgement, and privacy. Controversy Testing a controversial application presents a unique challenge… Continue reading Testing Peeple and Other Controversial Apps
Are Your Metrics Running on Empty?
Are your teams missing key deadlines due to the lack of quantifiable informative and actionable data? In the fast-paced business world of today, is your management team making key business decisions using metrics or reports that may be days or even weeks old? Is your organization burning hundreds of man-hours a year creating metrics and… Continue reading Are Your Metrics Running on Empty?
Performance Testing without Requirements
How can this be? Testing without requirements, a cornerstone of quality? Conducting functional testing with documented requirements is commonplace and expected. Software testers need pass/fail criteria when grappling with features and functionality. However, system and application performance evaluation is more subjective and the criteria used to judge a good or bad performing system under test… Continue reading Performance Testing without Requirements
Managing DbTable Objects in UFT
If your UFT testing involves a lot of database checkpoints or output values, then you’ve probably noticed that a lot of “DbTable_#” objects get created in your object repository (OR). The more checkpoints or output values you use, the more cluttered the OR gets. In the image below, you can see three DbTable objects have… Continue reading Managing DbTable Objects in UFT
Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse
As part of a workshop discussion someone posed the following example to our group of test professionals and asked how we would solve the following problems. I am paraphrasing. How do we insure data quality and integrity at the application programming interface (API) level in the new data warehouse? Note that the solution below is… Continue reading Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse
Intervention Coming for “I Hate Agile” Crowd
For all of the conferences held in agile’s honor, and the praise it gets from coaches, evangelists, and companies like Skytap, nobody calls it a silver bullet. But there’s one thing we all agree on—agile is very difficult. Whether looking at the culture change required, embracing the continuous integration, delivery and deployment of code, or… Continue reading Intervention Coming for “I Hate Agile” Crowd
The Challenges of Composite Architectures and How They Impact Testing
For complex software platforms, composite applications can be a much more efficient solution than the legacy approach involving loosely connected webs of applications, databases, and middleware. However, testing composite applications—which may need to interact successfully with 100, 1000 or more third-party components and the web services that connect them—is more complicated than testing a collection… Continue reading The Challenges of Composite Architectures and How They Impact Testing
Crowd Testing: Let Your Apps Take a Walk on the Wild Side
Despite its importance in the software development cycle, controlled lab testing can never identify all the issues that actual users might encounter. For mobile apps in particular, there are literally thousands of combinations of devices, operating systems and network conditions, making comprehensive testing of all scenarios impractical. Furthermore, because testers in the lab know what… Continue reading Crowd Testing: Let Your Apps Take a Walk on the Wild Side