Asha's Blog

Gurock Software announced the release of TestRail 2.2, a new version of their web-based test management software. TestRail helps software development teams and QA departments to efficiently manage, track, and organize their software testing efforts. TestRail 2.2 introduces improved issue tracker integration and comes with full support for Jira, FogBugz, Bugzilla and other tools.

While TestRail can already be integrated with most web-based bug tracking and project management solution, the new defect plugins improve the workflow of testers considerably as they don’t need to leave the application to accomplish common tasks. TestRail 2.2 ships with ready-to-use defect plugins for Jira, FogBugz, Bugzilla, Trac, YouTrack and Gemini.

The improved integration support allows testers to push bug reports from TestRail to third-party issue tracking tools while reusing the entered test results and test case details. Testers can now also look up bug reports, issue details and defect statuses in TestRail without having to access the bug tracking tool.

TestComplete 8, is the winner of this year’s Jolt Product Excellence Award in the Testing and Debugging category.

It is an easy, script-free point-and-click test harness assembly toolkit that can be promoted to a sophisticated, flexible script-driven system capable of running a range of application technologies through their paces, SmartBear Software’s merger with AutomatedQA’s TestComplete 8 is good news, and the tool should be at the top of any Windows developer’s list.

In addition to TestComplete’s full support of Windows frameworks and libraries spanning the .NET family of languages along with Silverlight and Windows Mobile emulator support, it also can be used to test Adobe AIR, Flex, and Flash as well as Java and JavaFX applications.

All the major test types can be executed, from functional, unit, and load testing to regression, data-driven, and distributed test configurations — along with several other types. Check out the nearly 30 screencasts of TestComplete 8 in action at http://www.automatedqa.com/products/testcomplete/screencasts/ and see for yourself why TestComplete 8 deserved the top spot in this year’s Jolt Award test tools category.

I’ve been recently looking into some checksum tools and here are the ones that I found to be very useful –

• jdigest, a Java GUI tool that generates and checks MD5 and SHA sums
• Jacksum, a Java API, usable both through a GUI and a CLI, which incorporates many checksum implementations and allows to extend with as many as you need.
• jcksum, a Java library, that can be used by developers in Java applications to calculate checksums using different algorithms.

Ofcourse, you can use the following tools in Unix to generate 32-bit CRC or MD5.

Prior to the launch of StressTester v7.2, performance testing would typically be executed at the end of the Agile development process. Traditional performance testing tools are not suited for execution during Agile project iterations due to their complex scripting requirements that can add weeks to the project timescale.

According to Reflective Solutions, the latest release of its performance testing software, StressTester v7.2, has become the first purpose-designed tool to enable correct and realistic performance testing during every iteration of an Agile project. The result is that application software performance issues can be quickly and easily identified and resolved as they are implemented, rather than at the end of the development process, enabling the Agile development community to benefit from greater efficiencies in project management, costs and timescales.

Reflective says the new release’s zero-scripting approach and rapid configuration make it quick and easy to learn and deploy. By reducing traditional testing timescales from weeks to days, it allows developers to finally treat performance testing with the same importance as unit and acceptance testing and gives them the means to execute a correct performance test at the end of every iteration. Becoming proficient with StressTester typically only requires a couple of hours of watching the tool’s in-built tutorial videos. This means that any member of the Agile team can quickly learn to execute performance tests compared with other tools that require scripting experts.

ISO/IEC 9126 Software engineering Product quality is an international standard for the evaluation of software quality

The quality model established in the first part of the standard, ISO/IEC 9126-1, classifies software quality in a structured set of characteristics and sub-characteristics as follows:

    * Functionality – A set of attributes that bear on the existence of a set of functions and their specified properties. The functions are those that satisfy stated or implied needs.
         
    * Reliability – A set of attributes that bear on the capability of software to maintain its level of performance under stated conditions for a stated period of time.
        
    * Usability – A set of attributes that bear on the effort needed for use, and on the individual assessment of such use, by a stated or implied set of users.
         
    * Efficiency – A set of attributes that bear on the relationship between the level of performance of the software and the amount of resources used, under stated conditions.
        
    * Maintainability – A set of attributes that bear on the effort needed to make specified modifications.
        
    * Portability – A set of attributes that bear on the ability of software to be transferred from one environment to another.

Selenium-Grid allows the Selenium-RC solution to scale for large test suites or test suites that must be run in multiple environments. With Selenium-Grid, multiple instances of Selenium-RC are running on various operating system and browser configurations; Each of these when launching register with a hub. When tests are sent to the hub they are then redirected to an available Selenium-RC, which will launch the browser and run the test. This allows for running tests in parallel, with the entire test suite theoretically taking only as long to run as the longest individual test.

Selenium-IDE is the Integrated Development Environment for building Selenium test cases. It operates as a Firefox add-on and provides an easy-to-use interface for developing and running individual test cases or entire test suites. Selenium-IDE has a recording feature, which will keep account of user actions as they are performed and store them as a reusable script to play back. It also has a context menu (right-click) integrated with the Firefox browser, which allows the user to pick from a list of assertions and verifications for the selected location. Selenium-IDE also offers full editing of test cases for more precision and control.

Although Selenium-IDE is a Firefox only add-on, tests created in it can also be run against other browsers by using Selenium-RC and specifying the name of the test suite on the command line.

Selenium-RC allows the test automation developer to use a programming language for maximum flexibility and extensibility in developing test logic. For instance, if the application under test returns a result set, and if the automated test program needs to run tests on each element in the result set, the programming language’s iteration support can be used to iterate through the result set, calling Selenium commands to run tests on each item.

Selenium-RC provides an API (Application Programming Interface) and library for each of its supported languages: HTML, Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. This ability to use Selenium-RC with a high-level programming language to develop test cases also allows the automated testing to be integrated with a project’s automated build environment.

Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language. Selenium provides a test domain specific language (DSL) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Java, Ruby, Groovy, Python, PHP, and Perl. Test playback is possible in most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms. Selenium provides a rich set of commands for fully testing your web-app in virtually any way you can imagine. The command set is often called selenese. These commands essentially create a testing language.
Selenium commands come in three “flavors”: Actions, Accessors and Assertions.
• Actions are commands that generally manipulate the state of the application. They do things like “click this link” and “select that option”. If an Action fails, or has an error, the execution of the current test is stopped.
• Accessors examine the state of the application and store the results in variables, e.g. “storeTitle”. They are also used to automatically generate Assertions.
• Assertions are like Accessors, but they verify that the state of the application conforms to what is expected. Examples include “make sure the page title is X” and “verify that this checkbox is checked”.