Testing is Rocket Science Not Brain Surgery

The need to create a file of a certain size to request from a webserver in order to simultate some network traffic  had me waxing nostalgically today.  Remember the command-line?  I suggest everyone dust off their OS reference manuals once in a while, if for no other reason than the novelty.  It amazes me that even today I still prefer to use command-line statements from time to time, I never did like Windows I thought it was for novice computer users.  As much as Microsoft has attempted to persuade me by bundling small user applications in their OS releases and addidng to the bloat, I still only use my OS for what is was originally intended to do; run programs and manage I/O, despite Redmond’s desire to take over the world.  Admittedly I did pick up (3) Xbox360s to run in tandem with Windows Media Center to extend my content throughout my home, oh and play games too!  One can never know when the urge to smash cars together and pretend to be a special ops superstar will strike, the controllers are wireless so its not a hassle to just plug-in while in bed.  This isn’t earning dividends in my relationship but hey, sometimes you just gotta game.

 I’ve digressed too much, the idea here is to fire up a utility called FSUTIL.

 The command-line help wasn’t all that good but with a little research we see that the usage is as follows:

“fsutil file createnew d:\temp\1mbtestfile.txt 1024000” will create a file called “1mbtestfile.txt” of 1meg in size.

 Sweet and simple for a change, now how cool is that?

Learn, Create, Understand, Test, Use and Save Regular Expressions with RegexBuddy™

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If you despise syntax as much as I do then this tool is a GodSend!

Software and Hardware are expensive stuff, all the more so when you take a long hard unbiased look at how management views performance testing and software-testing and/or QA in general.  Unfortunately, save for the most software intensive organizations, that view isn’t a good one.  Unless time is money (Banks, Brokerages, Exchanges), lives are at risk (Hospital, Pharmaceutical, Military), or appearances need to be upheld (Government, Software shops, Retail or large volume web-based transaction generators) performance testing is the last thing on a QA manager’s mind.  To those of you who vehemently deny this, I say “Great, feel free to contact me for work.”  The thing is, my viewpoint will probably be confirmed.
So where does that leave the performance tester?  “We’ve got a decommissioned server running Windows NT with a whopping 1 Gig of memory, single-core and a 10Mbit/sec network connection.  Don’t forget the open source package we found on Google to do our testing with, no one in the organization knows how to use it much less support it, good luck!”
Now I’m a snob, a self-admitted one so it comes as no surprise that I say walk away when these types of contracts or assignments come your way.  If it’s one thing I understand it’s this, if an application performs well the likelihood of bugs is low.  The reasoning behind this being, if you take the fastest medium on the planet to convey thoughts and processes and it runs like a Model T in a world of Bugatti and Ferrari you have written some poor code and made some poor architectural decisions.  Throw in some poor business processes and/or functional touch points with that and the picture is painted.  I find that code that truly performs well, sans the GUI, when you’re looking at it under a profiler usually has fewer bugs.  Maybe it’s a matter of the varying degrees of complexity of all the different apps I’ve seen and worked with but it is what it is.  I’d go so far as to say the development IQs of teams that produce well-behaving and apps that perform well are higher.  Going back to the point above, it’s hard to ruin an application’s performance, a lot of things however simple have to go wrong. [Read more →]

So I wake up early, because my body is in-between two time zones right now; to do a little morning trading before the market opens. Too my chagrin, my account is locked out at my broker. Could I have been compromised using the hotel’s less than secure Internet? I also left my wireless adaptor on all night by mistake, so now I’m a little worried. I try to log in a few more times but, no luck! I scramble looking for the “Contact Us” page at my broker’s website I jump in the car and place a call.

After providing answers to some pretty good security questions, the customer service rep resets my password, all systems go! Once I arrive in the office I try to log in, game over just that quick! WTF is going on here, because just as the casino would have it, the market is moving against my positions time is precious. So I hit redial hard enough to permanently leave the button depressed. Fuming, I walk through the security questions again and as the conversation unfolds I hear, “Hmmpf, never seen this before!” What would “this” be I ask. “Your account just locked itself out again!” [Read more →]

Backup EVERYTHING!

Well maybe not everything, but at the very least the repository for your results, think “archive” strategy because results will pile up all over the place if you’ve been following the recommendation to take multiple samples .  In addition, the application and hardware that serve as the hub of your testing infrastructure needs to be fully administered.  More often than not, its a situation where we have a few machines that have gone unused and are probably on their way to retirement to use as our performance testing infrastructure.  As tragic as that may be, what is even more problematic is that these machines often carry that stigma as we perform our testing.  Disks go without defragging, no backup policy is in place, there isn’t any redundancy, and the host OSes are not robust.  Some of this is outside our control but other parts only require a simlpe fix.  A process scheduler and a decent imaging or backup program, all of which can be acquired in the base install of an OS or as freeware are simple remedies.  Its important that we care for our assets like any other piece of corporate computing hardware in the datacenter.  To lose a test iteration is one thing, but trying to push through support tickets when the timing is critical and the impact to the schedule is in days can really hurt if you need a whole new install from scratch. [Read more →]