British Summertime and Visual Studio Team Test

Load Test Clocks Movement

I was running a Load / Stability  test on the weekend and noticed something strange with my results.

I kicked off my test at around 19:15 and after about 29 hours and 45 mins the webservers stopped responding.

At first I thought it was a network outage or something of the like, then I looked at the packets that my machine had sent to the server to check if it was a request or response issue. It seemed that my machine had stopped sending packets also. This ruled out a network issue as that would only stop responses and not request. So while I was scratching my head I remembered that the clocks in the UK had moved forward an hour on Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.

That was my answer. British Summer Time messing with my test results.

So clocks moving froward are one thing as you miss an hour so it looks like at no results on your test for this period (this is the non-existent hour of the movement of the clocks)

thinking about I thought what would happen for Winter when the clocks move backward. Would the Load Test send the page requests through twice for the same period. So that I get two sets of results for the hour 29-30 in my load test?.

Just a minor anomaly I noticed.

Larger Load Test Image Here

The Universal Constants of Software Testing

Software is Rarely Good, Cheap and Fast

This post will be about the topic I like to call the Universal Constants of testing.

What I find really important in my job is to get the business to buy into these constants and once achieved I find that everyone is happier with the end product when it is delivered.

Look at the triangle on the left to get an idea of what I mean by the Universal Constants.

I’ll also give some examples as I find that an example always to explain a new concept.

The basics of the Constant is that

• You can have it Fast and Cheap however it won’t be Good
• You can have it Fast and Good however it won’t be Cheap
• You can have it Good and Cheap however it won’t be Fast.

Read more…

We know what good looks like

Test This

I spoke with one of my previous employees last week who had attended an interview.

The manager of the company in question put a pencil on the table and said “Test That”. Stewart played along and said “where is the Spec”, what is it? what is it’s function.

Now Stewart is no dummy he knew it was a trick question and infact when he told me of the interview we both laughed for about 5-10 minutes saying we need to get some pencils made up with the words  Test That along the side of them for conferences etc.  Needless to say he did not accept the job offer and he classed it as a bad interview. Managers must know that such a basic and 1970′s type question is not going to catch anyone out. Infact its only going to make you and your company look dated. We’ve all heard that question many many times before and it doesn’t get any funnier or more interesting.

My point is that a job interview is a two way process. Yes I’m looking for the right candidate, someone who I think will be an asset not only to my testing team but also to the company as a whole.  A person who will come on board and give their experience gained in other workplaces willingly,  and one who also will be willing to learn a thing or two from the staff members whom are already on the team.  (Personal Development is a great thing).

I also know however that its not only me wanting them that counts but its also them wanting us. This brings me full circle to the post title “We Know What Good Looks Like”. Those were the words used by a previous manger of mine in an interview with me, This statement made me think that things there were not perfect,  however they wanted to change and that if I worked hard I could help them affect this change.

I was infused and accepted the job offer. If that same manager had put a pencil in front of me and said “Test That” I would have just gone through the motions of “what’s its purpose – is there a spec for the pencil”. Playing along with the game. Lets excite people when they walk through our door and not play games.

Read more…

Tags: Interviews, Testing

Bookmarklets for a Web-Tester

Code

In this post I want to give people a nice heads up to some of the tools I use in my daily role.

These are bookmarklets which is just another word for bookmarks which contain javascript.

I use these with firefox although IE and Opera should also fine fine for them also. In Firefox just add them to the bookmark toolbar and you’ll have them at your fingertips.

Zap Cookies! This will clear out any stored cookies for the current page/site

Edit Cookies! This will allow you to edit and stored cookies for the current page/site

View Cookies! This does exactly what it states, it allows you to view and stored cookies for the current page/site

Edit Page

Allows you to edit any page you use this on. All changes are temporary of course and only visible to you.  (will you ever trust a web page screen shot again?). Not yet sure how this fits into the testing arena, however I though I would include it as someone may make decent use out of it.

Find Redirects! This should list any redirects for the current page, however its currently a tiny bit hit and miss and is does not work 100% of the time, it should however suffice for now and I’ll most likely have to rewrite this at some point in the near future.

remove redirects Lets see what happens if we now remove those redirects we just found using the above Bookmarklet.

Wikipedia lookup This allows you to select any text on a page and once clicked it will lookup that text on Wikipedia

Yahoo site search This allows you to select any text on a page and once clicked it will search on Yahoo for more links from that domain with the same text.

Alexa This will carry out a search at Alexa for the domain you were on when you clicked this bookmarklet.

MSN IP Search Firstly I should thank Robert Hansen (RSnake) for this one. Once clicked it will carry out an IP search which can help you detect a wider network for your testing.

numbered list One of my favourites this one. It allows you to make a nice numbered list of all parameters on the page which contain numbers.

show hiddens This and Zap Cookies are my most used Bookmarklets. this one will display all hidden fields on a webpage and also allow you to edit them.

remove maxlength This will remove all the max lenghts from all input fields (think buffer overflows and code boundary issues)

undisable Who says you can’t click that button . This Bookmarklet will enable any disabled objects on the page.

up This will take you up one directory level in the site structure

top This will take you to the top of the domain.

decrement If your URL ends in a number it will reduce it by one every click

increment As above but the opposite

check images This will check the current page for broken images.

view variables This will list all variable types found on the page. This is more for Developers than testers however its still a useful one to have.

view scripts Like above however it will list all scripts what can be called on the current page.

zap images This should clear all of the images from the page. Works about 98% of the time. This script may need a little tweaking if I ever get the time.

full urls as link text Very useful if you want to see where a link is pointing to.

Enjoy

Martin H

Tags: code, productivity, Testing, tools

Today’s News FSA Boss Quits

I’ve decided to do a new piece called Today’s News,

What I’ll do is take a quick look on the Television news stations to work out what is the top news story and then I’ll give the website of the company or organisation a quick test. I’ll also state how long it too me to find the issue.

The site will be notified of course and I’ll update the blog post with any updates and responses from the site admin.

This will most likely be based on a Web Application Security (WebAppSec) test. I’ll leave out all of the 404′s and orphaned links etc.

Today’s major story was that the head of the FSA and a close advisor to Gordon Brown resigned.

FSA

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7883409.stm

Site = http://www.fsa.gov.uk/

Defect Found =XSS

Time Taken to find from arriving at homepage = 3minutes and 12 seconds.

Now some people may think that this is low hanging fruit type stuff and you may be correct, however as these sites in question will be all over the TV today and front page on tomorrows papers they are easy targets for potential hackers and Seo BalackHats alike.

Tags: Testing, Today's News, WebAppSec, XSS