This post is for all those that attended my talk at CASTx17 in Sydney (and of course for anyone else that cares). It just contains all the details for the tools and links I talked about.
Tag Archives: Oliver
My Daily Tool Use [Updated #2]
As 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.
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.
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.
Australian Testing Days 2016 in Melbourne
For those that have missed this so far, take note that there will be a cool conference coming up in Melbourne with yours truly. My expectations are high for the 1st Australian Testing Days conferece. The lineup and topics look top notch. Have a look here: https://testengineeringalliance.com/australian-testing-days-2016/
If you decide to book use ERLEWEIN15 in the coupon section for a 15% conference discount.
JMeter WebDriver Issue with Closing Browser
I have been playing a bit with using WebDriver (Jmeter-plugins) from within JMeter. Usually something I abhorr but it does have the occasionto do was restarting the browser (Firefox) every thread loop. This ended up in a failure every time it tried to close the browser.
A simple JMeter Execution Framework
For 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.
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.
Test Automation Sells
Somewhere I saw a statement that testing today is about 25% of IT budgets with a tendency to increase. Not sure if that’s true but even half of that is a lot of money. So of course managers and financial controllers are looking where they can eek out any spare $s.
Because testing and quality are not tangible or easily understood by outsiders it is tempting to cut and slash. There are no immediate or obvious down sides (50% of testing is still testing right?). Issues appear later and then the correlation back to the cause is spurious and it’s the operational budget then. And we all know testers are just all doom and gloom.
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.
Hello Test World 