Yesterday, SOASTA announced their new product, CloudTest Lite (Press Release). It's not common that I get excited about a tool product release, but this is different. This product has the potential to change the market for the better.

Scratch that. I'll be shocked if it doesn't change the market for the better.

Why is that, you ask? Consider the following attributes of CloutTest Lite:

• It's a fully featured, easy to learn and use, enterprise class, modern, performance testing tool for web & mobile applications
• All you need to use it is a reasonably modern machine connected to the internet and a web browser.
  • You don't need to buy, install, configure or maintain load generation machines.
  • The "license" is tied to your personal credentials, so you can design, create, execute, and analyze your tests from any machine you want without needing to figure out how to point to the license server, or how to get onto the corporate network from your favorite internet cafe.
  • You can even do much of the design, test enhancement, and analysis entirely off-line.
• You can simulate up to 100 virtual users any time you want. No more scheduling time on the controller days or weeks in advance guessing the app will be ready for your test. No more having to wait until your next scheduled time to re-run your test when you see something 'wonky' in your data.
• It's free.
  • Yes, I said free.
  • As in, you never need to pay a dime. Not today, not when the trial expires, not a year from now to continue your maintenance contract.
  • That's right, it is free from now until the sun explodes (or at least until well beyond when anything we're building or planning to build today is long gone and forgotten)

Imagine the implications:

December Issue of the Association for Software Testing Newsletter Now Available

So what was Mercury Interactive that then became Mercury is now to be rebranded HP. Apparently, this is on the basis of the IT industry being more familiar with HP than Mercury. I guess that's true in general, but not in the testing tool space. Even IBM has preserved the Rational name, but Rational had ditched the SQA name when they bought TeamTest. So that great Mercury bull-grabbed-by-the-horns t-shirt from STARwest in October is the last one in a long line of Mercury images.... Guess I could save it for eBay, but it’s too good an image not to wear! (Mind you, I could probably put my old SQA TeamTest t-shirt up on ebay now!)

On Tuesday 7/25/2006, CNNMoney.com (along with *many* others) broke the news that the rumored HP/Mercury deal is really happening. A summary and my reaction is below. See the entire release here and draw your own conclusions.

July 26 2006: 9:22 AM EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Hewlett-Packard agreed on Tuesday to buy Mercury Interactive for about $4.5 billion in stock, or $52 per share, in a bid to expand the computer maker's business software operations.

[textile]
Not directly related to testing, but this is a must have development tool - Multiplicity. I've been using it for a week now, and I think I'll buy a license today.

Multiplicity allows you to control multiple machines using one mouse/keyboard. I have a dual monitor system at home to begin with, but I keep many client files on my laptop because that's what I take on site. With multiplicity, I have three screens on my desktop, access to all my files (without having to set up a share or network anything), and for all practical purposes, I don't know it's a separate machine.

You can also copy text back and forth using the clipboard -- it's not much, but I've already found it handy for code and text from documents and emails.

Check it out. Also noteworthy, it's been up and running for a week now and I haven't noticed any bugs. Something rare...

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

[textile]
For those of you who don't know, I'm a avid user of the IBM Rational tools. I don't necessarily think they're that much better then any other commercial test tool, but I've done a lot of work with them. I know them fairly well, and they've been good to me over the past few years. All said and done they get the job done.

Having said that, I use the Rational tools a lot.

Recently I've also been doing a lot of web service testing which means I'm looking at a lot of XML. Imagine my surprise today when someone told me that there is an XML diff tool included in the Rational suite of tools. Shocked that I didn't know such a thing, I checked it out. You can find it here: "C:\Program Files\Rational\ClearCase\bin\xmldiffmrg.exe"

So clearly, I don't do a lot with ClearCase or I would already know about this tool.

Either way, I checked it out and I kinda like it. I figure if I didn't know it was there, others might not as know either. If you're paying for the Rational suite of tools, you need to get all the mileage out of them that you can.

If anyone else knows of any other hidden utilities or tools they would like to share, feel free to post them below (Rational related or not). Let's get the word out. I don't like it when I have useful tools installed that I don't even know I have.

Mike Kelly started with Stapler Testing and now he moves onto Screwdrivers. The first was an exercise in "Thinking like a Tester", the latter is an interesting metaphore for Test Tools.

I will try to hide my envy, as I wasn't able to go to the AWTA due to other commitments. I wish I could have been there as it sounds like it was excellent!

In his Screwdrivers post he says...