LoadStorm™

WebLOAD is a tool for functional and load testing your web services. It provides recording functionality to automate test creation. Some components of this application are open source. However, The Console and IDE source portions of the overall program are still proprietary, but are available for free in binary format. The project appears to be active, both internally and externally. Please refer to the WebLOAD home for a full description.

Yesterday, CNET reported that Facebook was down. It appears that this was an isolated and brief incident. According to Facebook, this was likely a hardware issue and per-user (one that affects only a particular user or small group of users). This would be consistent with what I have read about their architecture, that it is partitioned across thousands of servers.

Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister are principles of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a New York and London based consulting firm. They have several books published over the years and have been writing, consulting, and lecturing internationally since 1979 on topics such as estimating levels of productivity, effective management, and corporate culture.

Marnie L. Hutcheson entered the software testing industry at Prodigy Services Company(PSC) in 1987. Her early software testing experience consists of engineering and finance/banking automated software testing. Her career through the mid-90's primarily consisted of a variety of projects relating to distance/computer learning and updating legacy software to internet capability. Since 2000, she has provided consulting services to a variety of projects including Microsoft .NET Developers Training, Microsoft Network Solution Providers, and other agile projects.

Selenium is an open source project dedicated to providing a simple and flexible means of web application testing. Unlike client side load testers such as JMeter, Selenium is intended to test for correctness of presentation and functionality. As a testing tool, Selenium offers a finer level of control over the actions of virtual users. Developed as a Firefox plugin, Selenium users can quickly build complicated tests that involve navigating through several pages. This allows an engineer to create tests that mimic typical user behaviors, such as logging in and interacting with the web site.

When is software testing finished?

Determining when testing is completed is not always a simple matter. In any significant application, it is impossible to prove that the software will never fail. As an example, Microsoft employs thousands of professional testers for their Testing and QA Teams. These testers receive excellent training and tools. They have extensive backgrounds in software testing and quality assurance.

Black Box Tools and Techniques

• "Bang on it until it breaks"
• Automated Testing
• Regression Testing
• Boundary Analysis

Bang on the Software

One of the most important roles on a software development project team is Testing and Quality Assurance. This role on the team is charged with verifying that the application or system complies with the functional requirements. Or put another way, this role finds the bugs.

This is not a list that you want to be at the top of. 37 hours of downtime is a lot for any service that wants to keep their users. Their incredible growth has made them a poster child for scalability issues.

Reunion.com, Pownce, Bebo and hi5 round out the top 5 with over 12 hours of downtime in the first four months of the year.

Social Network Downtime by Royal Pingdom

There are several load testing tools that attempt to determine the behavior of systems, networks and servers when an application is concurrently used by a large number of users. Any good testing tool should help you to get a comprehensive picture of end-to-end system performance, test new and upgraded applications against predetermined performance requirements and identify and isolate issues in the application. A good tool also fits your budget. Features and cost are the two big factors in balancing the tool selection equation.