These days I have been quite occupied with a new development for checking the performance of applications and products. In this field, I came across a lot many applications (SLAMD, HTTPLoad, LoadRunner, etc.) and many new ways to check the performance based on API's and white-box. It is interesting to know what a simple (single) line change and make to the performance of an application. Also, came to know about Mutex and Semaphores. These are also in some ways instrumental in making an impact on the performance of the tool based on how and where locking is made use of.

In the course of my investigations, I came across a great site for Q&A: http://www.stackoverflow.com. This has been started by Joel (of joelonsoftware fame) and Jeff Atwood, along with a few other of their colleagues.

Back to the performance tools, I think SLAMD does a good job of checking web based applications. While for command line based ones or API checkers, I think the best way is to go with customized applications, which you build on your own, or start asking for help in the form of questions or professional consultancy :-)

Tags: performance automation api tools
Current Location: bangalore
Current Mood: into work
Current Music: take me to your heart (mltr)

People seem to be getting back to the UI testing tools these days. UI is gaining ground and the commercial products available for the same are again coming into focus. There is a lot of hype being created around tools like Selenium and these are actually living upto that hype. Thoughtworks is one company which does consultation for the Open Source tools in use today and they have an intensive Selenium knowledge base. People should be encouraged to use these tools, which are although OSS, they compensate in man hours spent if we take the training consultation from companies such as Thought Works.
Another one which has come up from the same stable of OpenQA.org is CubicTest. This uses the Selenium and Eclipse as a base and builds on top of that. A very useful tool, once the engineer knows how to use it. The learning curve for these tools may be high now due to the lesser penetration, but it is growing and soon might surpass the commercial ones soon enough.
The new Selenium and CubicTest versions are said to be major enhancements and robust stable ones.
So get onto this if you have a Java or Perl background or even with PHP now

Tags: automation, selenium, ui tools
Current Location: bangalore
Current Mood: busy

The perception of Y! as an Organization has for a long time been that of a Internet/Web-based Company. From a Business point of view on what Y! does, this seems like a perfectly correct view point and that is what it is famous for. Well! I agree to the same that it is a Internet/Web-based Company, but as an Organization, all that require a lot of technological thought and expertise to sustain and grow, along with an extreme sense of innovation within the Organization. It is the perception of the Web tag along with the unique name (made more so famous by the song & dance of 'Shammi Kapoor', in India's film Industry of yore), which has given the Company, although an excellent work culture, a wrong perception/view in the people's mind, of it not doing anything except to build and maintain Web Pages.
The above perception is something which needs to be taken care of whenever a new hire is made. Lots of people do not/can not visualize the technology which is going into making the Web and Y! a better place to be in, when the Internet is growing at this pace. From the outside they vie this as a place where people churn out Web pages and goof off as if still in their teens and College days. From the inside, it is more of an Academia. There are people who do churn away on Web pages, but those are pages made from a lot of technological thought and innovation. They have to be optimized for the maximum User Experience and minimal load times. Each page has a function to take care of, and a lot of thought process and sweat goes behind each. Along with the above, an optimized delivery platform is also there to be taken care of. Cable companies claim that their bandwidth is being used, but I think a better way to put it is, that it is being utilized (and not for free, as they wish the rest of the World to believe). An immense amount of innovation and technological thought process goes into each component of a Web page and this is where people don't/can't appreciate the value of the same. They see a great looking interface and will go and visit it, but not give a thought to the work and sweat which has given them the page.
All I say, Y! is more technologically oriented than any of the various other product Organizations I have gone through. Also, they have a truly great environment and work culture, which is to be appreciated and hopefully preserved for the future of the Organization. At the same time, trying to dispel the wrong notion developing in people's mind that technologically, it might not be the best place to work ad grow from.

Tags: technology, trends, work culture, yahoo
Current Location: Singapore
Current Mood: cynical

I have been reading the book "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and it does bring some interesting topics to the fore. This gives a very good perception of the world around us as is thought by the average American and what he thinks of the way outsourcing and off-shoring work. He has in this book brought out some interesting concepts and observations about India and the outsourcing concept. He has brought out a very good point in this. Companies have an ulterior motive by coming to any country. They wish to increase the spending power of the people there so that more money is circulated and the company in turn earns more a people will spend more. This concept is gaining ground in the major Indian cities and thus, fulfilling the prophecies set down by the Organizations which moved in here; hence, making them profitable.

Tags: world globalization multinationals devel
Current Location: bangalore
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Bad Boys!

There is a proliferation of automation tools in the markets these days. From the Open Source variety which may be paid or free, to the Commercial tools which claim to be the best in the market place. The main issue with all these is that they are meat for a particular kind of generic testing. The Commercial tools makers say that their tools are meant for a particular solution or are generic enough that they can be used in any kind of situation; but the issue here is that they are not configurable enough to be used in all kinds of situations. Similar are the issues related to the Open Source tools flooding the market these days. (Just run a search on Automation Tools, it gives about 25,600,000 results and 8,250,000 results for Testing Tools)

Of all the above results, each is advertising that their tool is the best. Although I have gone through plenty of these in my career as a automation engineer, I almost always had to tweak each one of these to suit my needs. This is required also, and for this purpose the makers of these tools have given each a tool command language (don't confuse with TCL/Tk). These languages are usually related or belong to the family of one of the scripting languages (mostly it seems to be VBScript in the some of the popular Commercial tools).
Nowadays, I am using and trying out some Open Source and a few Commercial ones. Of these, Selenium and Waitr, I have found interesting for the work I am doing. TestComplete is the Commercial one being used, along with Test Link; hence am using these. For Selenium, Flash integration looks a good prospect and I am planning on using FlexUnit along with Selenium tools for such. Lets see what happens and comes out of this going forward... :)

Tags: automation, flash, internet, selenium, testing tools, web
Current Location: boston
Current Music: i gonna be around - mltr

There is one field where I have not as yet encountered a language barrier and that is testing. An interesting concept came out the other day while I was attending a conference - "Whatever comes out of the Developer's desk, for testing the same, we require a simple understanding of the application and what is desired from it. Innovation is thing which is best left to Developers, but an analytical understanding is to be acquired for testing out anything. This is and should be the language of the Tester. And for this, the Developer can write in any human readable language, but the thinking mind will always be able to decipher it and work out the wrong it in... ".

Although, the above is true; we should not forget that the Developers also have the common logical thinking language similar to the analytical thinking language... :)

Tags: development, languages, testing
Current Location: sunnyvale
Current Music: sleeping child - mltr

There seem to have been a lot of enhancements going on in the Web sphere. Initially, the web was just a place to share information on academic topics around the world. But recently, the Web seems to have acquired a characteristics of its own, where the individuals as a collective drive what they think would succeed and what would not. This has seen the emergence of the various communities on-line where each is trying to grab a bigger pie of the on-line users and thus establish themselves as the front-runner is this race which has started off to attract users.

Where does all this lead to?
The basic answer to the above would be more Advertising revenue and hence more sales and thus more jobs to cater for these factors. Alone, the Web would not have propagated to where it is currently. Organizations realized during the initial days of the emergence of the Internet that this media was going to be one of the major revenue earning streams and along with that also a great tool for advertising their wares and again generate revenue in the process. These Organizations went about promoting the Internet for their own needs and hence the transmogrification of the Web from an academia interest to the entertainment interest of now.

Advertising has become the way of life of many these days. We have professionals and complete Web/Internet Companies/Organizations dedicated to this way of life and users who are happy on clicking through and checking the various fares thus advertised. This is beneficial for all, as the Companies get a good exposure of their products and employ more as sales increase and the people get more jobs and better pays which they can again spend in what they like from these advertisements. Money is circulated and this means good for the Governments, which can also grow their own Countries economies and make sure that the citizens get what is due to them. Taxes grow and so do incomes.

Who says Advertising is bad??

Tags: advertising, industry, internet, web
Current Location: bangalore
Current Mood: blank
Current Music: someday - mltr

An interesting them is emerging from the markets these days. Cross-platform and cross-browser automation of the UI. The Web has gone from being just the Internet as a platform for sharing information to a Internet as a platform to share almost anything which can be along with entertainment for the users. Now this sort of a shift requires a lot of innovation on the part of the developers to capture the users imagination or as it is popularly known as the eye-balls of the users. This then again makes the issue of a cross-browser compatible feature more interesting, as the varied users of the Internet world have that many varied browsers on which they wish to portray their Internet experience on. The browsers in themselves display the static HTML displays very proficiently, but when it comes to dynamic display (excluding Flash and its brothers/sisters) the browsers have a very nasty habit have having quirks which would get any developer totally frustrated on the way of making these work.

Now comes the work of the person who has to automate this process. The developer would have used many a tricks up his sleeve to get the cross-browser functionality working, and when it comes to testing this, the person doing so, also has to use his/her ingenuity. Most of the time we can get away with checking the same on a few generic functionalities, but it would hurt the business when RIA's come into the picture and people try to use these and encounter a place where they are about to make the highest score, but due to a browser incompatibility they are unable to proceed. This is where tools like Selenium jump in.

Selenium is cross-browser and can be used for cross-platform testing also. It can be based on a variety of scripting and proper languages, with which the person automating the process is aware of or has worked on. In my previous organization, they had used Perl and here we plan to use either Java or Perl. Along with this plans are also underfoot to use Flash and try to automate testing the Flash applications so that it makes work easier and more fruitful, as these days we seem to be getting a lot more of Flash based applications which are proliferating the Web world.

More on this later...

Tags: automation, browsers, flash, selenium
Current Location: bangalore
Current Mood: creative

This is an interesting aspect of the software industry work life which has come out into the fore front of all the other technologies. The User Interface or GUI as it is more popularly known as has become an object of desire for almost the complete industry and most of the Organizations have started giving it a coveted position. These days selling software is more of how and where you catch the users eye and then how you tend to utilize that capability to the best of your interests [basically these translate to where the Organization can earn to make your salary a reality].

So has also been the shift in testing of the software created. We are also becoming more UI centric nowadays. Due to this technologies like JavaScript and MFC have gained popularity in the QA world. These days the QA part is more intensive and require the knowledge of all kinds of tools and languages, which for a normal 'testing' person were not mandatory to learn and work on just a few years ago.

Need to get more updated on this, and will bring in more topics on what is to be done for this. For now, do go over the book: Effective Software Test Automation - Kanglin Li and Mengqi Wu [Developing an Automated Software Testing Tool]. In this they have described the creation of a automation test tool using C++ and MFC. It is both GUI and command console based. I think we need to get something on similar lines working for GNU/Linux also.

Tags: automation, javascript, ui, work
Current Location: bangalore
Current Mood: artistic

I started off in the latest organization with the automation of web pages. They already have a suite which uses JavaScript to do some of the automation, but it is mostly based on the concept of using ActiveX controls to read and write to files. If I wish to test out any of the other browsers, I would have to either put a conditional statement there or to have a couple of workarounds which will work in both IE and FF [these being the popular ones these days]. Again with IE7 I faced another problem on ActiveX, so it goes out of the scope.
Now what the basic framework developed does, is simply to search for a given ID tag and do some action on that. But the UI has started using some 'dojo' elements and these usually get a dynamic Id which cannot be found when the application is created with the JavaScript elements. So I am back to the drawing board with this. I took me some time to also get the pause facility in JavaScript to start working. Now, I know that JavaScript is derived from the same base as was ActionScript, i.e., ECMA Standard, but it has a lot of differences and nuisances of its own and its varied development cycles to make it all the more difficult to work on.

So, currently I am back to the drawing board to check if I can make out something with the 'setTimeout()' function, or do I go with a Pause class in JavaScript. The other alternate being the function where a while loop is used and the system waits for the given time to finish off. Now with these alternates I have one problem which keeps creeping up - the browser starts to pop up messages which say 'A Script is running slowly and might effect the system. Do you want to stop it?'. Well! what the !@#$%^&* hell can't the browser be intuitive enough to know that I am deliberately pausing the script to acomplish something...

Tags: automation, javascript, ui, work
Current Location: bangalore
Current Mood: bitchy