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.
At the Web 2.0 Expo, Geir Magnusson delivered his prediction of the upcoming demise of relational systems: “The Sequel to SQL: Why You Won’t Find Your RDBMS in the Clouds.” This reminds me of the old saying that the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. 
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.
Testing provider SOASTA received 6.4 million in new funding from several VC funds to pursue automated software testing in the cloud. They are using Amazon’s EC2 to generate elastic load, and have completed a 100,000 user test.
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.
Hurricane Ike uprooted even the strongest of the trees in its trail. The picture shows an uprooted tree aftermath Ike in Dayton, Ohio in September, 2008.
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.
WebLOAD is an open source load testing application developed as a continuation of an older proprietary product. WebLOAD is marketed as a free alternative to costly proprietary solutions, such as the LoadRunner suite offered by Hewlett Packard. The product also offers tools that are compliant with common standards, such as testing scripts that are written in JavaScript. This allows unit testing engineers and the core team to communicate effectively, without any need to overcome a language barrier. The interactive test building capability of WebLOAD is also a highlight of the program.
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.
Some prominent services have experienced problems in the past week or so.
Infoweek article by David Berlind
Black Box Tools and Techniques
- “Bang on it until it breaks”
- Automated Testing
- Regression Testing
- Boundary Analysis
Bang on the Software
A weekend outage plagued Amazon’s S3 service with 8 hours of disrupted service, “elevated error rates”. Their Simple Queue Service, SQS was also affected but the EC2 service was not.
I expect that these kinds of issues with Amazon will disappear, and we remain enthusiastic users of Amazon’s Web Services. EC2 has been surprisingly reliable for us with no downtime in nearly a year of use.
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.
Overall, it seems that Twitter has improved since the terrible downtime in the first half of this year. This particular failure affects only part of the service, but one that is no doubt frustrating for many users.
Here are a few notes about Twitter’s architecture from their blog:
- Large single MySQL database with replication to slaves for read queries
- Originally a Ruby on Rails application, although I think they have migrated pieces to C++
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
Websites have evolved significantly since the inception of the internet from simple pages that conveyed information to interactive entities that users can manipulate and utilize for many different purposes. As websites evolved and became more complicated so did the possible interaction between web users and websites giving websites more and more complicated programs, applications, and coding. The increased functionality of websites made them more useful for visitors but also created more ways for the new more complicated programming to fail.
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.
Selenium Core is a software testing tool for website applications. With this test program web developers can test the functionality of their website applications with a variety of browsers and under a variety of conditions simulating the different visitors that can use the web site. Selenium Core runs directly in a browser just like real users and supports different operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac, and browsers including Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox.