Sunday, October 31, 2010

Top Ten STP Conference Experiences

I plan to write up individual posts on some of the sessions attended at the STP Conference.  In the mean time I thought I would rank the sessions and experiences in order of value to me. 
  1. Session 103 - Testers! Get out of the Quality Assurance business - Michael Bolton
  2. Keynote - G Forces in the Organization - Kent Beck
  3. Keynote - Nice Bike: Fueling Performance with Passion - Mark Scharenbroich
  4. Breakfast bytes - Agile Testing Ninjas - Lanette Creamer
  5. Breakfast bytes - Pirates are better than Ninjas Even in the Agile World - Adam Goucher
  6. Workshop - Hands on Performance Testing Dan Downing and Goranka Bjedov
  7. Session 403 - Ever Been fooled by Performance Testing Results? - Mieke Gevers
  8. Session 305 - From Start to Success with Web Automation - Adam Goucher
  9. Keynote - Top Ten Leadership Skills: Surviving and thriving in 21st Century - Kelli Vria
  10. Party on the Strip - Christian Audigier at Treasure Island (met many great Testers!)
If you attended, what were your top ten?

Friday, October 29, 2010

Better Late than never

I finally realized that there are many great blogs that I follow, so I had better add a blog list to my tiny space of free thought on testing.

What really inspired me to do this was this post:

http://cartoontester.blogspot.com/2010/10/monotonous-context-and-certification.html

The cartoon absolutely illustrates that testers can get caught in a rut.  Collectively we need to continuously remind ourselves to get out of the rut. 

Think, experiment, and do!

I wish I had the creative mind to do great cartoons like Andy Glover.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

AWK and GREP are your friends!

I definitely plan to write up some lessons learned from the STP Conference, but I thought I would share this quick tidbit for performance testers.

Our website profile is constantly changing so we inspect our log files to determine the correct mix for our performance testing.  There are many ways to do this and you can get as complex as you want.  Typically we choose our peak traffic day.

You have an access log and you want to know ratio of the number of GETS to the number of POSTS.

This command should give you the total number of requests.

cat | awk '{ print $7 }' | wc

This command should give you the total number of GETS.

 cat |grep \"GET | awk '{ print $7 }' | wc

This command should give you the number of POSTS.

 cat |grep \"POST | awk '{ print $7 }' | wc 

You can substitute "less" for the "wc" and you will see on your screen all of the GET requests.

You can use multiple grep segments to further refine your data. 

cat |grep \"GET | grep " 200 " | awk '{ print $7 }' | wc 

So my specific test I am only interesting in GETS with response code of "200".  I could write these results to a file.

cat |grep \"GET | grep " 200 " | awk '{ print $7 }' | wc >> foo.txt 

Yes some of you already know this stuff, but my main point is that you can learn a ton about your site traffic simply by dissecting the access logs.  You can generate a flat file that can be used by your performance tool of choice to randomly send requests to your system.  You can write a simple shell script that can take any access log and generate a quick breakdown on the request profile.  This profile can be used to proportion your performance test traffic in a similar pattern as your current user base.


Go ahead and karate chop your access logs!

 

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Short Post on STP Conference

It is pouring down rain in Las Vegas.  Yes I said pouring down rain.  The rain and long taxi line is preventing us from going back to our condo.  So we are hanging out waiting to go to the big party at Treasure Island.  We will be true geeks and take our computer backpacks to the party.

So here are my short thoughts.
  • Great people
  • Extremely engaging
  • Some material unfortunately is not applicable to the things we are currently focused on
  • Some speakers I could listen to all day long
  • I am eating way to much food
  • I am doing tons of walking, but not off setting the amount of food and mmmm alcohol
  • I am having a great time
  • And the organizers of the event are doing a FABULOUS job!
  • I hope I can be a presenter in the near future.
  • I hope I can continue to collaborate with some of these smart people.
  • And final note - I wish I had a large volume of cash
Hopefully I will find the time to post future blogs on all of the things that are currently floating around in my two brain cells.

Have fun!

Thursday, October 14, 2010

STP Conference are you ready for me?

On Sunday I depart with 2 colleagues for Las Vegas to attend the STP Conference.  I am pumped up.  I am ready to learn what is happening in the wonderful world of testing.

On Monday I am attending an all day hands workshop about Performance Testing.  I do know how to use JMeter, but I am hoping to learn more tricks and gain insight as to how others approach performance testing.  Perhaps I have a few tricks up my sleeve to share!

Here are some of the other sessions I am hoping to actively participate in.
  1. Testers!  Get Out of the Quality Assurance Business by Michael Bolton
  2. Becoming an Automation Entrepreneur by Linda Hayes
  3. From Start to Success with Web Automation by Adam Goucher
  4. Ever Been Fooled by Performance Test Results? by Mieke Gevers
  5. Testing in an Agile Environment by Rob Walsh
  6. Test Faster: Model Your Test Process to Test Faster by John Ruberto
  7. Using Open Source Testing at Ford by Frank Cohen
  8. What You Need to Know About Performance Testing by Michael Czeiszperger
I may switch gears and attend other sessions, depending on the value.  There are so many excellent topics to choose from.  I am hoping to meet and network with as many testing gurus as possible.

There are a couple of key note speakers I am curious about Kelli Vrla and Kent Beck.  I am sure they will all be interesting.   The real key is to keep me away from poker tables.  :o)

Stay tuned for future posts on various topics spinning in my two brain cells after the conference.

Happy Testing!