Sys-con.com have released a great article on Cloud Load Testing.   The article, first of a multi part approach gives users a view of how to choose the right approach.

Titled “Benefits of Loading Test in the Cloud (Part 1)” the Article is written by Steve Weisfeldt

Many companies have moved applications to the cloud as a way to reduce capital expenditure while improving IT focus and effectiveness. End users see the cloud as a way to access their documents and applications remotely from anywhere and from any device. IT managers see the cloud as a means of rapidly adapting their infrastructures as needed via virtualization and a pay-per use-model. But what about load testing engineers? Can they seize the opportunities afforded by the cloud to better test the performance of web applications?

As with past overhyped trends in IT, it is important to see past all the talk and look for concrete ways to take advantage of this new technology’s flexibility and scalability to save time, reduce costs, and improve the way your organization works.

This article describes how the cloud is revolutionizing load testing and the advantages it provides in many situations for ensuring your web applications perform well in production. It also covers key capabilities to look for in a load testing solution. Without the right tools in place, simply moving your testing activities to the cloud will likely not deliver the results necessary to justify the move. Understanding how to apply the right tools and practices to make the most of the cloud is fundamental to cloud-based testing and vital to ultimately going live with total peace of mind.

To read the full article please read http://www.sys-con.com/node/2118613

Automation Consultants Ltd, the IT services and software company, today announces the launch of TestWave, a full-service, cloud-based test management tool. Priced at £75 per user per month, and instantly accessible through a web browser, TestWave fills a gap in the market for a full service test tool that is affordable and easy to use.

The software has been developed in-house by Automation Consultants’ team of engineers who have consulted on testing projects and IT transformations for clients that include BSkyB and Vodafone. It easily manages the testing of an IT system by enabling teams to store test scripts, analyse results, and record and track defects. Test Managers can see the progress of testing in real time through intuitive dashboards, and map the testing to releases and requirements.

Francis Miers, TestWave Director at Automation Consultants, comments: “Having worked in this sector for a decade, we knew there was a need for a test management tool that could reduce waste in IT projects without breaking the bank. TestWave enables the test manager to keep track of the progress of the many tests involved in any significant IT project, regardless of the scale of the project or whether it is spread over multiple locations.”

Compared to tracking testing by spreadsheets and e-mail, TestWave reduces duplication and omission, and makes management easier by showing the current state of testing in a series of intuitive real-time dashboards. It is therefore ideal for software development or major changes to existing systems such as upgrades.

TestWave is built on Automation Consultants’ own platform, Xappworks, which allows users to code in the cloud.

“We naturally turned to the cloud to support TestWave as we knew the demand was there for a simple-to-use tool that can be instantly accessed via a browser and incurs no installation or management costs”, concludes Miers.

With all the new products coming out in the next week at VMworld, here are two announcements that might be worth a closer look: test tools that are based in the cloud. The idea is that you run your test suites from the cloud, so you can share your test scripts and results easily, and get your test beds setup quickly. It is a nifty idea.

The first is from Automation Consultants Ltd. They announced the launch of TestWave, a full-service, cloud-based test management tool. Priced at $150 per user per month, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial. TestWave manages the testing of an IT system by enabling teams of testers to store test scripts, analyze results, and record and track defects.

Next up is Ixia, a company who has been around the testing space for more than a decade and offers a wide variety of tools to examine the most complex of data center infrastructures. They have a new product called IxLoad-VM, which measures the quality and capacity of cloud data center components, applications, and networks to deliver effective cloud-based services.

IxLoad-VM works with IxNetwork-VM, which assesses layer 2/3 network performance in virtual environments. IxLoad-VM uses “virtual test ports,” which are virtualized software implementations to measure true quality of experience and capacity loads. No pricing information is available, but typically these tools are five-figure purchases or can be rented for a $1,000 minimum 90-day period.

More information can be found at: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/08/two-cloud-based-test-tools-thi.php

Sauce Labs, the web application testing company, today introduced Selenium 2 support as part of its flagship cloud application testing service. Selenium 2 is the result of collaboration in the Selenium community to integrate the WebDriver project with the Selenium project. With over 4 million downloads in just 4 years, the Selenium project is one of the world’s most popular software testing frameworks for web applications.

“The focus of Selenium 2 has been our users. When your Selenium tests pass, you can be confident that your applications will work for your users,” said Simon Stewart, original creator of WebDriver and Senior Software Engineer in Test at Google. “I’m extremely pleased to see Sauce Labs carry this attention to the user from the open source project to their Sauce OnDemand service. Also, it’s extremely cool to have a video of each and every test that is run!”

Advances in Selenium 2 allow Selenium to work more tightly with browsers, offering high fidelity emulation of interactions such as clicking and typing so companies can ensure the performance of their web applications across the diverse base of browsers in use today. Key advances include:

• Support for iPhone and Android testing – Selenium 2 includes built-in Android and iPhone emulators to allow developers and QA teams to expand their use of Selenium to support the growing demand for mobile applications. Mobile application testing will be available on Sauce OnDemand in Q1 2011, but users of the service can take advantage of all other new features in Selenium 2 today.
• New API - The Selenium 2 API is more developer friendly and is also conceptually simpler because it directs users to focus on only two basic objects: WebDriver (browsers) and WebElements (anything on a web page) to construct tests. Selenium provides API libraries for most modern programming languages. In Selenium 2, every API library has been tailored to each programming language for easier usability.
• Improved architecture – Selenium 2 now features more advanced automation bindings for each browser to provide the best, most stable way to test applications. The low-level approach that Selenium 2 uses to control browsers is a more solid base for the project to add features for currently supported browsers, and provides a better framework for supporting more browsers in the future.
• Enhanced scalability – The new Selenium 2 architecture allows developers and QA teams to “scale up and down.” When a developer or QA wants to test locally on a single machine, Selenium 2 is more streamlined and “scales down” — no longer requiring the use of a background server process to control the browser from their test scripts. Therefore, simple test scenarios only call for a simplified test infrastructure. However, when teams want to run tests across multiple machines with multiple browser configurations, Selenium still retains the power necessary to handle upward scaling needs.

“Selenium sparked a revolution when it was released in 2004. We didn’t have the options for testing Ajax applications that we have today, and it was all too common to have a QA team test by hand. Selenium 2 has fomented another revolution in testing web applications, making it feasible to test this kind of application without the overhead and workarounds that the first evolution of Selenium necessitated,” said Julian Simpson, Principal Consultant at The Build Doctor. “Sauce Labs is another kind of revolution, making it easy for anybody to enjoy Selenium 2’s ease of testing with freedom from the tyranny of deploying an array of browsers and operating systems. Using Sauce OnDemand is worth it to avoid Internet Explorer 6 alone.”

“At Sauce Labs, we’re proud to provide a Selenium 2 offering that delivers one of the most robust testing experiences for web and mobile applications available today,” said Jason Huggins, original creator of the Selenium project and co-founder of Sauce Labs. “Selenium 2 is a significant advancement for application testing because it moves beyond some of the previous challenges in Selenium 1’s architecture and provides a stable base for enhancing the entire tool chain. We’re confident Selenium 2 will prove to be very compelling for developers and QA teams alike.”

datacenterjournal.com has featured a great article on Testing and the Cloud.

In the article, titled Open Source in the Cloud, and written by Vasanthan Dasan is CTO and EVP of Engineering for Smart Infrastructure services at The Armada Group, the article discusses the trends in Open SourceT estng and benefits to the end user:

“The open-source movement is growing rapidly and is having a major impact on the way businesses model their IT strategies. One of the business areas where open source is beginning to have a noticeable effect is cloud computing. Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design by allowing access to its source code. It has revolutionized the world of information technology by encouraging a community-driven approach to building software and applications. In a similar way, cloud computing uses a distributed resource delivery and usage model, encouraging users to access their resources (hardware or software) via a network. The benefits of the cloud computing model are scalability, which appears to be infinite, and instant access or provisioning.”

To read the full article open source testing

Embarcadero Technologies, a leading provider of multi-platform database tools and developer software, announced the first of three Embarcadero® RAD Studio XE sneak previews leading up to the launch of the new application development suite in early September. The upcoming “2011” release will be named RAD Studio XE and will include Delphi® XE, C++Builder® XE, Delphi Prism™ XE and RadPHP™ XE.

This first sneak preview showcases developer and team productivity enhancements that will be made possible with the new release, along with enhancements to the IDE and new tool chain, modeling and debugging capabilities. These new core productivity enhancements will enable developers to better manage their source code and, ultimately, streamline the development process.

New RAD Studio XE features revealed in this first preview include:

• Subversion version control integration to help manage source code revisions in the Delphi, C++Builder and Delphi Prism IDEs
• Rapid PHP web development added to RAD Studio with RadPHP XE
• New debugging features for Delphi, C++Builder and RadPHP
• Modeling enhancements in Delphi XE, including enhanced code generation from the modeler for higher quality code, as well as the ability to generate sequence diagrams from methods

“Developers are constantly challenged to keep productivity high, yet they’re also required to manage source code revisions for themselves and within their team,” said Michael Swindell, senior vice president of marketing and product management for Embarcadero Technologies. “These new capabilities offer very specific benefits that will enable developers to save time on coding, increase productivity and focus on developing quality applications faster.”

The RAD Studio XE release also marks the extension of the new XE brand and capability set to Embarcadero’s application development line, including RAD Studio and each standalone tool in the suite. XE products are distinguished by three key components: support for multiple database types and deployment environments; Embarcadero® ToolCloud technology for centralized license management and on-demand tool access; and an easy upgrade path to Embarcadero® All-Access™ XE.

As with all Embarcadero tools, the RAD Studio XE suite of products will also be available via the Embarcadero All-Access toolbox.

Throughout August, Embarcadero will be showcasing sneak previews to show what’s in store for RAD Studio XE with its new versions of Delphi XE, C++Builder XE, Delphi Prism XE and, now, RadPHP XE.

According to a report in EE Times Asia, Wind River reveals the Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) for Android -based devices.

Customizable for different silicon architectures, it can work across any device manufacturer or operator in need of testing Android software stacks. The test solution claims to streamline and automate the software testing process, thus reducing time and cost to develop Android devices, while improving software quality and stability, and helping users verify and prove compliance with Android Compatibility Test Suite, or CTS.

Targeted for operators, device manufacturers, independent software vendors and silicon providers who need to test Android-based devices, FAST reduces the time and costs associated with testing software by automating thousands of heterogeneous tests and then consolidating the results into a single uniform database, easily accessible using virtually any reporting tool. Thus, manufacturers can focus efforts and resources on developing features that will differentiate their mobile devices from the competition and verifying Android compliancy, instead of spending a majority of their development time on testing.

FAST tests span a wide range of categories including graphics and boot-time, interoperability for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, telephony and board support package tests. The company’s test library provides coverage of tested code from low level, middleware and up to the application level.

For more information please visit EE Times Asia

According to an article in informationweek, IBM have announced plans to introduce a hardware/software set for Integrated Product Management as well as software testing in the cloud.

The announcement was made at Innovate 2010, IBM’s, convening of the Rational Software user group.  The event is currently in its 13th year and opened in Orlando on Monday.

According to Scott Hebner, VP of marketing of IBM, A new availability of software testing tools will be available.  Instead of paying a fixed price for a tool or set of tools, customers will buy credits or “tokens” for tool use.

“You can exchange tokens for the tools you need when you need them. There’s no procurement process, which normally loses valuable time as you await fulfillment,” said Hebner. The approach, based on the “pay for use” concept associated with cloud computing, allows customers to decide on what tools they want to use as they get into a project, rather than forcing a purchase beforehand.