On a forum related to James Bach's Rapid Software Testing On-line (Beta) class (which I highly recommend! A few more technical issues to work out and it should be ready for prime-time) another student (Anne Marie Martin, from Atlanta) posted the following (lightly edited):

Here's something I struggle with though, and would love to hear thoughts on. I have about 11 years experience in testing, and try to invest time in learning more about testing, and learning more in general that can help me with testing - such as the things we've all been discussing about philosophy and learning and Weinberg and a hundred other things that have tickled my brain during our discussions and threads that made my 'to do' list of things to read or explore or learn from.

I use to be a very strong advocate for SOAPscope. That's before I upgraded from v4.1. to v5.2. Now I have an odd bug where I have to re-enter my licensing information every time I start the server. SOAPscope crashes when I attempt to add certain WSDLs to my project. And the new user interface is much much slower and a bit more clunky looking (making it difficult to navigate).

soapui to the rescue! A co-worker, Steve Keizer, turned me on to soapui yesterday. Then I noticed Chris McMahon had blogged about it (a strong reference in my mind). Within ten minutes, I had it up and running, pointing to my WSDL (the one that crashes SOAPscope), and had executed my first test. And, it's free...

A Word with the Wise:
Choosing Performance Testing with Scott Barber
by Joseph McAllister

Every kid eventually puts some thought into the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" For PerfTestPlus CTO Scott Barber, who specializes in context-driven performance testing and analysis for distributed multi-user systems, the answer was not "performance tester." He planned to follow in the footsteps of his father, an industrial arts teacher, and sought an ROTC-scholarship-funded degree in civil engineering. In his junior year of college, though, Scott learned that his first years with the Army Corps of Engineers would involve digging foxholes for infantry rather than building bridges with the Seabees.

I have spent a lot of time playing around with graphics libraries and toolkits for integrating real-time graphs within my own testing and monitoring tools. It seems like there are many open source tools available in the world of performance testing and system monitoring. And lots of people roll their own tools in whatever programming language they are into... but many lack graphics capabilities.

Two of the toolkits/libraries I end up using often for my own homebrew test tools are: RRDTool , and JRobin.

from the RRDTool site:
"RRD is the Acronym for Round Robin Database. RRD is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it can create beautiful graphs. It can be used via simple shell scripts or as a perl module."

So...
RRDTool is a really good back-end for storing time-series data; which is pretty much all we care about when we are doing performance testing. It has bindings for various scripting languages, or can be invoked from the command line. If you are developing tools that need a data repository and graphing capabilities, this provides you both. You create an RRD and then you begin inserting data values at regular intervals. You then call the graphing API to have a graph displayed. The cool thing about this data storage is its “round robin” nature. You define various time spans, and the granularity at which you want them stored. I fixed binary file is created, and this never grows in size over time. As you insert more data, it is inserted into each span. As results are collected, they are averaged and rolled into successive time spans. It makes a much more efficient system than using your own complex object structures, or a relational database, or file system storage.

You will probably recognize the graphs it creates, as RRDTool is integrated in many popular monitoring tools (it is Free/Open Source, GPL License). I have built many tools around RRDTool, and it is really a nice system.

If you are in the Java world, there is a very cool project named JRobin. JRobin is a clone of RRDTool in pure Java. So you can create RRD's directly from your Java code.. and all in memory if you want to!

Some days I pretend to be a Java programmer, so I had to build a tool using JRobin. As a proof of concept, I wrote a small network latency monitoring tool. It shows off some of JRobin's capabilities. It pings a host at a given interval and records the latency. A graph of the network latency is rendered in real-time onto a Swing panel.

Here is my network latency monitoring tool: NetPlot (includes Java source code, GPL Licensed)

The tool itself is just a trivial example, and really isn't the point. But you could easily adapt this code or create your own to develop real-time graphs of your own time-series data.

(hmm.. I wonder if I could hook this into JMeter? probably..)


(How freaking ironic?.. I've been using this thing for a while now, but I decided to check the JRobin web site while I'm writing this.. and the developer just ceased development of the project and turned over all related rights to OpenNMS. can someone reading this please take over JRobin maintenance? .. erm seriously)

-Corey Goldberg
www.goldb.org

I am software engineer specializing in performance, automated testing, and tool development. I am also a Free and Open Source software advocate. I use a variety of open source tools to get my job done.

The following is a list of what is currently in my "tool box" for performance testing and monitoring. I use these tools daily and highly reccomend all of them:


OpenSTA (www.opensta.org)
Load generator for HTTP performance/load/stress testing.
Programming Language: Written in C++/MFC. Scripts are written for it using proprietary scripting language (SCL).

JMeter (jakarta.apache.org/jmeter)
Load generator for HTTP performance/load/stress testing.
Programming Language: Java/Swing

MRTG (www.mrtg.org)
System Monitoring (server/network utilization and transaction response timing)
Programming Language: Written in Perl. Plugins are written for it using any language.

RRDTool (www.rrdtool.org)
Data logging and graphing application.
Programming Language: C

Drraw (web.taranis.org/drraw)
Web front-end for viewing RRD data (system monitoring)
Programming Language: Perl/CGI with embedded HTML

WebInject (www.webinject.org)
Web/HTTP function/regression testing and performance monitoring.
Programming Language: Perl

PyMeter (coming soon to openqa.org)
Agentless system monitoring (server/network utilization)
Programming Language: Written in Python. Plugins are written for it using Python.

Nagios (www.nagios.org)
System monitoring (server/network utilization and transaction response timing)
Programming Language: Written in C. Plugins are written for it using any language.

Ethereal (www.ethereal.com)
Network Protocol Analyzer.
Programming Language: C++


what's in your open source tool box?

-Corey Goldberg
www.goldb.org

How would you like it if this happened? Have HTTP::Recorder to create scripts on fly to work with SAMIE module. Personally, i think it would be great to have such recording functionality. But as we know, HTTP::Recorder doesn't support SSL or javascript.... would that effects your tests? really?... Think again...


One way of avoiding/bypassing SSL restriction i could think of is to simply record the scripts with SSL disabled, and then manually just go in and change http to https....

[textile] Last weekend we held the June session of the Indianapolis Workshops on Software Testing. The attendees were:

• Taher Attari
• Charlie Audritsh
• Mike Goempel
• Michael Kelly
• Marc Labranche
• Jeffrey Mexin
• Patrick Milligan
• Richard Moffatt
• Dana Spears
• Jon Strayer

The topic we focused on for the five-hour workshop was open source testing tools.

When I first came across testingreflections.com, I was inspired as to how a group of men and women have come together to express their views and opinions on quality. I was even more impressed by the various bloggers who have an open and innovative mind toward quality and test automation.

I recently started a blog called Guerrilla QA. In short, Guerrilla QA is a philosophy that based on working with the minimum, and getting the maximum. In other words, what do you do when there is no documentation, requirements, coding standards, formal methodology, budget, test tools or test management software in your organizaton?