Recent and Upcoming Conferences & Technical Community Events

Here are pointers to interesting recent and upcoming technical conferences that should be of interest:

• Requirements Engineering and Design: A Tribute to Michael Jackson 19 May 2009 (part of ICSE 2009), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
• 1st International Workshop on the Quality of Service-Oriented Software Systems (QUASOSS'09), 25 August 2009, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
• 11th International Symposium on Web Systems Evolution 25-26 September 2009, Edmonton, Canada.
• 14th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies -- Ada-Europe 2009 8-12 June 2009, Brest, France, EU.
• Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges of Cloud Computing, held in conjunction with the 31st ICSE, 23 May 2009, Vancouver, Canada.
• IEEE 2009 International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD-II 2009), 21-25 September 2009, Bangalore, India.

These events deserve careful consideration, so please take a look at each of them!

Selected Forum Items

Here is a selection of interesting recent queries and responses in the eValid User Forum:

• Application Mode Explained (Regression Testing)
• Right Page with Right Test? (Synchronization Issues)
• Dynamic Access to sourceIndex and elementValue values (DOM Processing)
• Capacity Issues (Application Monitoring)
• LoadTest Run (Server Loading)

We invite eValid users to create an account on the eValid User Forum and post queries or responses.

New PerformanceTest Pricing Option

If you are concerned with server capacity issues when you have users running complex web applications -- including those with heavy AJAX components -- then you will want to take note of the newly updated PerformanceTest Service Overview.

There are now five server loading options to choose, from 5,000 users to 40,000 users. What's more important is that there is special introductory pricing. The leverage in this new eValid-based service offering comes from use of machine images running "in the cloud". Contact us if you have questions.

EC2 Sample LoadTest Screenshots

There has been a lot of discussion recently about using the "compute cloud" as the test driver of choice for various kinds of testing including, in particular, server load testing. Cloud images are inexpensive, powerful, and increasingly widely available.

Readers of this BLOG are aware that evalid has some unique characteristics that suit it well for driving very large amounts of load. Recently we provisioned some tests for the Amazon EC2 compute cloud and took a set of EC2 Sample LoadTest Screenshots.

These images show (1) four machine instances each with a 100-browser test ready to go, (2) a zoom-in view showing the test script ready to launch in singleton mode, (3) a mid-playback view after the LoadTest scenario is launched and all 100 eValid copies are running, (4, 5, 6) individual from-the-cloud eValid reports taken at the end of the run, and (7) the EC2 control panel showing the four instances.

Let us know if you would like more details about how to use eValid for server load generation from cloud images.

Webinar: Server Loading Made Simple

Load Your Web Application With User Emulations -- No Virtual Users!
Two Clicks Gets You A Script And 100+ Users.
Leverage Up To 10,000+ Users With Cloud Computing.

Thursday, 16 April 2009 — 2:00 PM Eastern Time / 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Outline Automation is all around us: in banking, airline reservations, online shopping. More machines, and fewer human agents. In this world, machine performance equals business performance. Because downtime or poor performance - slow response time of your specific application - translates directly into lost revenues.

Fortunately new technologies like eValid provide you with the peace of mind that your Internet Presence is stable and that every customer who uses your web application will be served. Even if your web application uses AJAX - as so many of the newest web apps do - you can still get 100's of actual user emulations from each PC image.

This webinar shows how the eValid functional test engine can record tests quickly, and then put them in "server loading mode" to perform stress and capacity checks of your server.

Speaker Edward Miller, eValid's Chief Architect, will discuss key aspects of use of eValid as a Rich Internet Application (RIA) monitoring engine:

* How to create reliable, reproducible functional tests of your application quickly and inexpensively.
* How to provision your test for LoadTest operation.
* How to create a LoadTest scenario that launches 100's of eValid instances.
* How to scale the volume of users you expect.
* How to run eValid LoadTest scenarios on Cloud instances, to get 1000's of user emulations.
* How to find the "knee of the curve" of response time version total number of users.
* How to pinpoint bottlenecks and constraint points.

Moderator Rita Bral, VP/Communications of Software Research, will act as moderator for the webinar, drawing upon her years of experience as a communicator (Rita speaks five languages), and her credentials as an event organizer.

Welcome to New eValid Users

We'd like to welcome the following new and continuing eValid customers to the growing eValid user community:

• Clickability, Inc. (USA)
  
• First Citizens Bank (USA)
• Innovative Scheduling (USA)
• SAIC (USA)
• Stonebranch (USA)
  
• Universidad Iberoamericana (MEXICO)
• VMC Consulting (USA)

Here's an expanded list of several hundred Selected Customers by Industry Sector.

eValid Monitoring Demo Upgraded

In an earlier post we pointed out the live demo done by the SuperVisions group in Belgium, which uses eValid to monitor access to various websites and display detailed timing data, using a combination of the GroundWork network monitoring system and the new NagVis graphic representation system from Nagios, for which the SuperVisions team is now the sponsor.

To see the demo go to the Super-Visions IT Peace Of Mind page and log in using the account "demo" with password "demo" to see the monitoring/reporting dashboard.

Under the "S-V_website_infra" [Super-Visions Website Infrastructure] option you'll see a picture of their web support stack, with the servers and associated networks on the left, and the eValid engine simulating a user working the website on the right. In this diagram you can hover over a "checkmark" to see immediate details, or double click on it to see the data expanded.