Category Archives: Performance Testing

JMeter-plugins WebDriver using specific Firefox version/EXE

This post only concerns WebDriver if used with JMeter via the WebDriver jmeter-plugins.

As you probably well know WebDriver is picky when it comes to browser versions. You will have one version of Firefox installed but WebDriver wants another to execute. There is no google-obvious way to tell JMeter/WebDriver to pick a specific EXE. So here goes how that is done:

  1. Download the version of Firefox that you need here.
  2. Right-click on the EXE and “open archive” with a compression program.
  3. Copy the content of the core folder to where you want to have it installed (in this example C:\<path>\firefox_47.0).
  4. Start Firefox and type about:preferences#advanced<enter> in the address bar.
  5. Under Advanced, Select Update. Check the settings.
  6. Turn off installing of updates.
  7. Now start JMeter from the command line with: jmeter.bat -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin=C:\<path>\Firefox_47.0\firefox.exe

If you now start your WebDriver JMX it will choose the specific Firefox version.

by

Oliver Erlewein

JMeter and WSSE

WSSE signing and/or encryption has always been an issue no-matter what tool you use. One of the reasons for the ongoing success of SoapUI as that does it magically somehow. 😉

Thankfully my colleague Till Neunast has now written a wrapper that allows you to use WSSE with JMeter. Just install and away you go (nearly). It is really no less complex than the SoapUI variant. It is still early days and should be treated with caution(!!) and I can imagine there still being some change to the project but it’s a very good start and a long awaited reprieve from the personal hell that WSSE has been in the past. So excuse me for being a bit overexcited.

If you do end up using the plugin please feed back any issues or improvements to the project or Till for that matter.

To download please see here:
https://github.com/tilln/jmeter-wssecurity

by
Oliver Erlewein

My Daily Tool Use [Updated #2]

SublimeAs a performance tester I spend most of my daily time somewhere between the browser and a web server. I also so spend a lot of time on servers themselves analysing data. So I thought I’d write a bit about the tool landscape I tend to use. In my tool selection I favour Open Source software. Mainly because I don’t have to fluff around with licenses but also because I can look at code if I need to. It allows me to focus my resources on training people. I do tend to feed back into OSS, whenever I can (which is seldom as I am usually not that clever;-) ).

I also do a lot of bespoke programming to automate processes. This is not at the level a developer would do things but more on a simple scripting level. But not to be underestimated what power this can unleash in your day to day work.

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ATD2016 a Solid Success

I’ve just returned from Melbourne, where the inaugural Australia Testing Days 2016 (#ATD2k16) was held. I love these conferences. They are really what drives our community. In this case the TEAM Meetup Melbourne gave rise to the conference, which is new. Usually it’s the other way around, that smaller groups emerge from conferences. Nonetheless  I thought it was a great success. People seemed to enjoy themselves and by the amount of participation I saw they were keenly interested too.

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Controlling JMeter ThreadGroups with -1

When I script large JMeter projects I immediately default to run scripts through config files. That means that all sorts of variables get pre loaded at the start of the test (VariablesFromCSV is a huge help!). From there I control things like URLs, usernames and passwords,… but I also control Thread Groups. Recently I came across the issue that I wanted to switch in such a config file between a test that ran for a certain length of time to a test that ran only X number of iterations.

For all of you that have used JMeter you know that that might be an issue.

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A simple JMeter Execution Framework

GitHubFor years I have been thinking of open sourcing the work I do. I see the Blog here as a simple part of that effort. The main -selfish- reason though is, so I don’t have to carry code around from A to B and I can safeguard it from someone claiming it as their own (even me). Open sourcing is something easier said than done. Especially if things are over a certain size and the things I do are usually very tailored to the project context, which makes it difficult to generalise.

But… all things have to start small. I have released WinMinoTaur on GitHub today. These are just some small Windows batch files but they make test execution life with JMeter a bit easier. You no longer depend on the UI to execute tests.

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Every Tester is a Performance Tester

…at least to some degree. Well, there are human conditions that distort the perception of time but it’s highly unlikely that you’re one of them. So you are a performance tester too.

The biggest annoyance for a performance tester is to get code into a performance environment that CLEARLY has issues that can be detected by the simplest means available (well.. second most annoying, as finding obvious functional defects is even worse). This is where you as a (whatever kind of) tester come in.

You know the times you drum your fingers on the desk waiting for that spinning wheel in the browser to come back? The batch job where the execution is exactly “making one cup of coffee” long? The usual response from you would be to shrug and say something like “This is just the environment. It’s system test afterall.” or “Let performance testing take care of it”.

Now, I can totally relate to such sentiments! We’re all busy and have deadlines to meet. I’d make the case though that you’d actually help the project as a whole and thereby yourself too by not ignoring such issues.

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CheatSheet for JMeter __time Function Calls

Often I have to deal with dates and times in my scripting and luckily JMeter is quite good at dealing with them. The function to call is __time (JMeter doco http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/functions.html). The thing is the doco is pretty sketchy about all the different formats it can take. So I just created a test script to see what works. The examples are below ready to copy & paste. I also have included scripts for time and date manipulation for completeness.

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Extracting a value from JSON with JMeter

So again an issue I had and thought I’d share. I found very little about this on Google. The problem I had was, that I got a JSON response from a site that contained an ID I’d need to use on the next page. The challange was that I had a variable in the regex which JMeter doesn’t seem to like. The easiest way to do this is to use JMeter-plugins!!!

Short post, if it were not for the unlucky fact that I couldn’t use the plugins. So here the long answer….

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