|
Volume
5, Issue 1
June 2011
US Office
Ascert, LLC
759
Bridgeway
Sausalito, CA 94965
USA
Tel.
+1 415-339-8500
UK Office
Ascert, Ltd
63
Mansell Street
London, E1 8AN
England, UK
Tel. +44 (20) 7488 3470
www.ascert.com
|
Don't
be a "test dummy". Get testing smarts through
VersaTest
Automator! |
Where We Have
Been
SunTUG Summit
Tampa, FL
March 11, 2011
MRTUG
Meeting
Oak Brook, IL
March
15, 2011
SunTUG
Summit
Tampa, FL
March 15, 2011
OTUG
Columbus, OH
March 17, 2011
QUEST
Boston,
MA
April 4,
2011
EBUG
Berlin,
Germany
April
12, 2011
HP
Discover
Las Vegas, NV
June 6-10,
2011
ACI Customer Exchange
San Diego,
CA
June 7, 2011
Where We Are Going
Midwest
Acquirers Conference Oak Brook, IL July 26-28
CTUG
Conference
Mississauga, ON, Canada
October
26, 2011
Ascert
User Group 2011
Lord's
Cricket Ground
London,
England
November 17,
2011
| Welcome
to this edition of the Testing Times. Inside we
continue our discussion on gaining efficiencies in
testing through process and automation. Have you
ever thought about how much money you save through
automation? Check out the piece that
follows. Let us know what you think at info@ascert.com.
If testing automation allows you to do
more testing in the same amount of time, are you saving
money? If testing automation allows you to do more
testing in the same amount of time, are you saving
money? That's the question isn't it? I guess it is all
in how you slice it.
More
Details
VersaTest Automator 1.3 Release Now
Available
Ascert
announced today the general release of version 1.3 of
VersaTest Automation Server and VersaTest
Automator. Major enhancements in this version
include the further expansion of message handling
capabilities within the products.
More
Details
Ascert Expands its Automator Driver
Base
If you are a VersaTest Automator user, have you
looked at the available drivers in your software
lately? If not, you might be surprised at how much
it has grown in the last few months!
More
Details
Questions
& Answers
Ascert's product developers give answers to some of
the questions they regularly get asked. See what other
users are talking about and ask your own questions.
More
Details
If
testing automation allows you to do more testing in the
same amount of time, are you saving
money?
That's the question, isn't it?
I guess it's all in how you slice it. If you are only
counting man hours expended and you don't reduce those
hours when automation occurs, then I guess the answer is
no. But the question is really bigger than how many man
hours are you saving. Unless you reduce staff, you
don't save money there. People in the testing
profession know that there's never enough time to do the
testing required. The answer is really not reduced
staff but how you can redeploy that staff to cover areas
of testing that you don't currently have time to handle,
or handle thoroughly.
You'd be surprised at how
much "risk-based" testing occurs out there. Or, maybe
not if you're doing it. Not everything needs to be
tested. There is a place for risk-based testing.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things not being
tested because of time and it's like going to an
off-strip Las Vegas casino and hoping the dice aren't
loaded. At some point the odds are against you and
you're going to lose. And, you hope it's not a big loss
for the company and you lose your job!
So let's
look at it another way. If you use the same people that
are no longer doing the repetitive testing and redeploy
them to do more higher level testing, are you saving
money? The answer is yes. How much you're are saving is
hard to tell. But imagine the costs if you missed a
defect. How much is your reputation worth with your
customers? How much is time lost in a system that is not
running due to a defect? Only you can answer that
question for your organization, but the amount is far
from nothing.
It's hard to justify expenditures
for things you can't measure. Think of more complete
testing as buying insurance. You hate to pay for it but
you'd hate if more if you needed it and didn't have it.
The great thing about automating your testing is the
time that you buy (insurance) and it doesn't cost you a
penny more in man hours. Next time the marketing guy
asks you to justify your testing budget ask him to
justify (and quantify the ROI) for his advertising!
Ascert announced the general
release of version 1.3 of VersaTest Automation Server
and VersaTest Automator. Major enhancements in
this version include the further expansion of message
handling capabilities within the products. This includes
the addition of native support for the standard internet
protocols of HTTP and HTTPS within drivers which greatly
enhances the areas in which VersaTest can operate.
In combination with improvements to the handling of SOAP
messages, Ascert takes its automated testing tools into
the world of Web Services. SOAP messages can be
transported over HTTP, HTTPS and WebSphere MQ
protocols.
This latest version also demonstrates
Ascert's commitment to inter-operability with HP Quality
Center with updates that allow VersaTest Automator to
communicate with the product over secure channels.
Additionally, improvements have been made to improve the
performance of interactions between Quality Center and
the VersaTest Automation Server in large
installations.
In addition to the time savings
when performing tests, VersaTest Automator decreases the
time involved in analyzing testing results. With
an easy to use GUI interface and "audit capture"
functionality, the product increases both testing
accuracy as well as ROI. To find out more about
VersaTest Automator, visit Automation
Savings.
Ascert Expands its Automator Driver
Base
Due to increased demand, the
Ascert Development team has been busy creating new
drivers for VersaTest Automator. Recently released
were four new drivers:
- American Express
- SWIFT
- Bankserv
- VTERM for 6530 green screen testing
These new drivers have
significant advantages over the VersaTest Classic
variety. First, they run in an automated testing
system. Second , the architecture allows them to
be much more easily maintained. Lastly, many of
the functions that were previously written Drivers are
included in the test cases, making test cased
development and management a much easier task.
Want to know more about
VersaTest Automator and DFS Drivers? Write us at
info@ascert.com.
Questions &
Answers
Q. Our test
scripts are failing because VersaTest is validating
fields incorrectly. What could be causing
this?
A.
Assuming the failure is not because the application is
in error, it is more likely that there is an issue with
the test scripts containing the validation. If it is a
test that sometimes passes and sometimes fails, one
thing to check is that the EXPECT match rules are
sufficiently unambiguous to match the correct message
being sent by the application (assuming the failure is
not because the application is in error) for the
particular test scenario.
Q. Why does my
connection attempt fail (with error 2059) after the 10th
session connect to an NSK IBM WebSphere MQ Queue
Manager?
A. The reason for this
is that by default, when created, a Queue Manager has by
default, a maximum of 10 channels that can be attached
to it. The following are quotations from the IBM
WebSphere MQ for NSK manual for version 5.1 of the
product.
"Maximum number of
channels for the queue manager
There is a limit
to the number of channels that may be controlled at any
one time
for a queue manager. If the limit is too
high, performance may be affected as this
parameter
dictates the size of the channel status table, on which
numerous search
operations are performed. If the
limit is too low, you may not be able to
control
enough channels for your application. The
MaxChannels field of the Channels stanza
in the QMINI
file defines the maximum number of channels that can be
controlled
simultaneously.
The default on
creation is 10. There is no way to override the default
on creation.
The MaxChannels entry in the Channels
stanza of the QMINI file can be changed at
any time,
though the change does not take effect until the queue
manager is
restarted.
There is a limit to the
number of concurrently active (running) channels in a
queue manager. This may be used to control the peak
demand on system resources by channels. The
MaxActiveChannels entry in the Channels stanza in the
QMINI file defines the maximum number of active channels
for the queue manager. The default on creation is
10. There is no way to override the default on
creation. The MaxActiveChannels entry in the QMINI
file can be changed at any time, though the change does
not take effect until the queue manager is
restarted.
In particular note that "There is no
way to override the default on creation". This
means that in order to rectify the problem you need to
stop the Queue Manager, edit the QMINI and then re-start
the Queue Manager. Deleting the queue manager removes
the QMINI file and so it would be created from scratch,
with the default value of 10, the next time the Queue
Manager was started."
Have a question? Send us an email to support@ascert.com
and ask the experts!
Copyright © 2011 Ascert, LLC. All rights reserved.
Duplication of any portion of the Testing Times is
permitted with prior written approval from Ascert,
LLC. |
