Current Conferences & Events

Here are references to interesting upcoming technical conferences that should be of interest to the Web Quality Community:

• SAFECOMP 2009, Theme: Best Practice & State-Of-The-Art, 15-18 September 2009, Hamburg, Germany, EU.
• Model-Based Verification and Validation -- From Research To Practice as part of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Secure Software Integration and Reliability Improvement, 8-10 July 2009, Shanghai, China.
• ISTI-2009: First Workshop on Automating Test Case Design, Selection, and Evaluation 17-20 June 2009, Povoa de Varzim, Portugal, EU.
• 9th Int. Workshop on Formal Approaches to Testing of Software (FATES), 2-4 November 2009, Eindhoven, Netherlands, EU
• International Workshop on Self Healing Web Services [SHWS 2009], 10 July 2009, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

These events deserve careful consideration, so please take a look!

eValid V9 Introduced

eValid's Ver. 9 has arrived! With an already rich feature set, eValid V9 has expanded its features for testing complex web applications with special emphasis on AJAX:

• Comprehensive DOM-element motion commands, to permit detailed manipulation of the web application.
• Enhanced eValid programmatic interface (EPI) to allow eValid commands and browser actions to run from a CPP/C++ programs.
• Advanced methods for DOM-based AJAX synchronization.
• A capability to create "lite" URL-based HTTP type load tests.
• New commands to support RIA monitoring reporting and control.

Here is the complete eValid V9 Press Release announcement.

Web Testing Productivity: Less IS More (Webinar)

For tough times you need efficient, compact, powerful, and cost-effective solutions.

This eValid Webinar focuses attention on these key issues:

Web Testing Productivity: Less IS More!

That page gives a short description of the Webinar and provides complete registration instructions.

Comparing Two Screen Results

A common problem in regression testing is to compare two results that typically are arrived at by differnt methods, and show up on different screens. This is more complex that the usual case, when you know the correct value in advance and all you need to do is to validate it against the current value. In this more-complex case you need to compare TWO values, both computed in real-time, not known in advance, and showing up on two separate screens.

Here is a description of how this is done in eValid using the DOM manipulation features that are included in eValid V9 release: Result Value Validation Using DOM Commands.

Update on eValid Monitoring, New Demo

Here is a minor update on use of eValid functional tests in "monitoring mode" -- that is, running the functional test over and over and having the data the playback generates fed into a database for studying trends.

Monitoring Mode Statistics

We've heard from one customer last week that they are running over 1,000,000 eValid playbacks per month in their application monitoring installation. To do that they have multiple eValid playback agents running multiple tests on each machine.

We think that over 1,000,000 tests per month in a single customer installation is a real milestone for eValid.

Example Monitoring Illustration

In a different context, but still dealing with eValid monitoring agents, the SuperVisions group in Belgium has fielded a demonstration of their implementation of the Groundwork/Nagios monitoring system that includes an illustration of eValid application testing.

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 click to see things expanded. The graphs typically show the response times for a four-step sequence of viewing a web page and manipulating it.

Typical User Forum Entries

eValid customers regularly post really good questions to the eValid User Forum about how to apply eValid to a wide range of applications. Here is a sampling of interesting recent user forum postings:

• Conception of a Test-System of Websites -- Answers to an academic research survey about test system architecture.
• Email Delivery Time Monitoring -- A common kind of request, when you want to monitor performance of an email system.
• Complex Loading Situation -- Issues about use of eValid in the "Cloud".
• Why is Ajax Testing So Difficult? -- Opening the difficult issue of testing AJAX applications.
• ROI and Licensing Options -- A discussion that deals with various eValid licensing options.

We encourage readers to review these User Forum posts, and the wealth of material about eValid that you'll find there.

Current Conferences & Events

Here are a couple of upcoming conferences that should be of interest to the web testing and quality community that focus on model-based approaches:

• International Workshop on Modeling, Simulation, Verification and Validation of Enterprise Information Systems (MSVVEIS-2009
  6-10 May 2009, Milan, Italy.
  Tests of a good model of an application are often as good as or even better than tests of the application itself.
• 2nd Workshop on Model-Based testing in Practice (MOTIP'2009),
  23-24 June 2009, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands.
  Putting model-based testing into practice can be problematic because of lack of understanding of modeling languages and associated methodologies.

These events deserve careful consideration, so please take a look!