Here is a tool that no tester should be without - BBTest Assistant made by blueberry software. I love this piece of software. It helps you show bugs that aren’t “reproducible”.
One time we logged a bug about performance of a certain part of our app. We were dismissed and told we were being impatient and too picky. We created a BBtest assistant movie of the perfomance showing the delay the user would go through. Guess what happened after that? Yup - the bug got fixed. The proof is in the video….
Knowing what’s going on during a testing session is important. Some of the tools outlined in this video help you see the bugs sneaking around your computer.
I thought I would post some videos from the CAST 2007 testing conference. CAST stands for Conference of the Association of Software Testing. I was lucky enought to attend this past summer. At the conference there was a testing competition. The basic idea was we were given software and asked to test it. We had access to the developer and business owner (who happened to be the same person) as well as access to a bug tracking tool.
We could submit bugs using the tool and also gain extra points for doing a video presentation of some of the bugs as well as the techniques we used.
I wanted to toot my own horn here and say that we killed the competition. Nah - We pwned it!!!! My team (Team Canada) won first prize based on our bugs, techniques and test report. Unfortunately we couldn’t claim the $1500 cash prize because one person on our team was linked with the conference (in a very loose way). Thanks again Paul!!!!!
I wanted to post some of the videos that I was in during the competition. Here is the first one - talking about
How do you load test an application when the application makes remote calls to Windows machines, uses WMI to collect and return information and stores the info in a central database?
We can fake it by calling each machine more than once but this isn’t exactly the same. I can tell you the other ways we’ve tried to solve the problem creatively but I’d rather not get into that right now.
I’m looking for access to 4000-5000+ machines. The machines can be physical or virtual. They can be windows or linux. I’d prefer more windows than linux. A user account that has admin type privileges is required so that we can read the data off the machines (although someone else can type in the password so we don’t have to know it). The system has to collect data for 1-2 months.
On a side note - there are other types of applications out there that do this type of stuff. Does anyone know how they load test?
If you know of anyone who might know someone that would have access to this many machines or perhaps work on a product like cirba, or microsoft systems center (formerly MOM), or VMware’s consolidation planning tool - I’d love to talk to them (even if we make a competing product )
