Recent and Upcoming Conferences & Technical Community Events

Here are links to some technical meetings that could be of general interest to WQN readers:

• Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST9) 30 January -- 1 February 2010, Melbourne, Florida, USA.
• IEEE International Conference on Software Testing Techniques, Verification and Validation, 6-9 April 2010, Paris, France, EU.
• 2nd International Workshop on Testing Techniques and Experimentation Benchmarks for Event-Driven Software (TESTBEDS 2010), 6 April 2010, Paris, France, EU.
• 5th International Workshop on Mutation Analysis (Mutation 2010), 6 April 2010, Paris, France, EU.
• International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2010), 5-9 July 2010, Vienna, Austria, EU.
• International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2010), 12-16 July 2010, Trento, Italy, EU.

These events all deserve careful consideration!

Using eValid to Tune Web Pages

We have had a number of users ask us how to improve the performance of their web pages?

Usually that means that they have some page that is slow or sluggish and they want to know the features of the page that are causing the problem. And, that requires being able to look at pages as they load and see what is going on.

There is a way to do this very simply with eValid, described in our Using Paused Playback to Study Page Timing data.

In a nutshell what this amounts to is to (a) set the timing level for eValid's EventLog to "Detailed," (b) run a script with a Breakpoint command to have eValid "Pause" with the browser active, and then (c) study the details about all of the page components to find where a performance problem lies.

This process builds intuition very quickly, because the detailed timing data reports every page component's size, download speed, and order of completion. Try this on a big website like CNN.com and you'll be able to see the nearly 200 page elements that make up what you see in the finally-composed and rendered browser face.

Try the same on a page that is done with AJAX and you can see the page components that are updated after the original page load is complete.

Users with this kind of detail don't have much trouble finding the "big offenders" in their pages.

Examples of Google Docs Testing

We have been updating our worked examples to include application of the structural testing commands in eValid to some of the popular types of applications --ones that are good examples of "difficult to test" web applications.

We have recently completed two examples that deal with different aspects of Google Docs:

• Spreadsheets
  Here the issue is whether you can easily create a new spreadsheet, or open an existing one, manipulate it easily, and validate results. You can see the results at this page: Testing Google Docs -- Spreadsheet Option.
  
  
• Text Documents
  In this case the issue is similar, but now the job is just to be able to perform basic actions on a Google Docs document. Our example can be seen here: Testing Google Docs -- Document Option.
  

What ties these two examples together is that the basic script was created "from life" using eValid's recording capability. From that recording we modified some of the passages to use the pure-structural commands that manipulate the DOM to produce the right playback effects.

Interesting Posts to the eValid Forum

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

• How To Find The Broken Link (Forum: Site Analysis)
  
• Using eValid on a GWT Application (Forum: AJAX Applications)
  
• Automated Build Testing (Forum: General Topics)
  
• What's the story on 'time to first byte'? (Forum: Application Monitoring)
  
• Monitoring/Functional Testing Script with SAP Applications (Forum: Application Monitoring)
  

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