The virtualization market offers many choices and develops rapidly. Many companies acknowledge that tests are necessary for making the right decisions for their specific situation, but the complexity of these tests prevents them from doing so. Login VSI provides insight in performance and scalability of VDI and SBC environments by simulating user workloads. The introduction of Login VSI 3.5 offers even more ease of use and enhanced analysis options.

“Login VSI is developed specifically for (vendor) independent benchmarking of virtualized desktop infrastructures and is becoming the worldwide industry standard for testing SBC and VDI environments” said Jeroen van de Kamp, CTO Login Consultants. “Almost every large vendor uses Login VSI for research and development in their laboratory. This encouraged us to enhance Login VSI with more options to gain detailed test results”.

Login VSI now visualizes the differences between results in one chart, helps to recognize trends and provides insight in the RemoteFX performance on virtual machine level and hypervisor level. In addition to more analysis options, Login VSI 3.5 is also easier to setup and use. It is no longer required to install Login VSI on every launcher and test cycles can be fully automated. Other new features include the ability to pause a test and to automatically reset workloads when a session freezes.

Visit www.loginvsi.com for a complete overview of new features and a free trial version of Login VSI 3.5.

MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen.

Current version is capable of capturing the whole desktop, a highlighted window, an active menu, a control, or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen. MWSnap handles 5 most popular graphics formats and contains several graphical tools: a zoom, a ruler, a color picker and a window spy. It can be also used as a fast picture viewer or converter.

MWSnap does not require installation and does not need any special dlls, drivers or system files which can mess up your system

View TesterTools dedicated page for this tool.

Unit Tests are the cornerstone of code quality assurance. However, writing quality unit tests is not an easy task. Unit testing requires time, patience and know-how. These overheads of the development cycle can be dramatically reduced with QuickUnit.

Key Features

* C# support (VB.Net expected shortly!)
* Intuitive and easy-to-use User Interface
* Provides clear guidance on unit testing best practices
* Suggest potentially interesting values for diverse scenarios
* Automatically filter out heuristically irrelevant members and variables
* Design unit tests without “losing scope”
* Full Visual Studio integration
* Support for all major testing and mocking frameworks
* Customizable style for test code generation
* Compare variables to the actual values with one click

Gource is a software version control visualization tool.Software projects are displayed by Gource as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its centre.

Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.Currently there is first party support for Git and Mercurial, and third party (using additional steps) for CVS and SVN.

For more info on this tool click here.

GCT was my third coverage tool.  It instruments C code in a source-to-source translation, then passes the instrumented code to a compiler.  Its first major use was on a Unix kernel, so it is suitable for measuring the coverage of embedded systems.

In addition to branch and multiple-condition coverage, it also has boundary-condition and loop coverage.  I find those useful and inexpensive types of coverage, and I’m disappointed that more coverage tools don’t include them.

It also contains a type of coverage we used for evaluating stress testing of a multiprocessor kernel.

However: GCC was written in 1992 using the GNU C compiler (gcc) as a base.  For reasons too boring to explain, it still has most of the original GCC code in it.   The practical effect of that is that porting GCT is not as trivial as it should be. Although there are Linux and Solaris ports, I do not have appropriate configuration files for them.  (If you do, please send them to me.)  There are no ports to any version of Windows or other non-Unix operating systems.  I would be stunned to see one.

Since GCT is based on gcc 1.x, it does not handle some gcc 2.x constructs.  There has been a mostly-completed port from gcc 1.x to 2.x, but I have not used it myself.

GCC has no GUI for looking at coverage results.  The output is formatted like error messages from a compiler.  It comes with an Emacs mode (based on M-x next-error) that I rather liked.  But non-Emacs users are left out in the cold – as they are in so many things.

View TesterTools dedicated page for this tool.

There are many tools like Mockups, GUI Prototyping, Wireframing and other buzzwords like that, but the point is to improve user interface quality and usability.  Some of these tools are enterprise ready, some are in the early level of development with many issues and finally some of them are in the middle.  Today I want to write about the one which is the middle class representative, named FlairBuilder.  Let’s draw the short review, but first explore some basic requirements for such systems.

Usability

Why we are using wireframing, mockups?  Because we want to create high usability user interface.  Yes, but how to do that with poor usability tool?  Must be clear, fast, predictable and all the other adjectives regarding proper GUI design.

Presentation

The system must allow online mock-ups presentation, using a separate, free player: html files, flash presentations or screenshots.

Components

Should have a large set of components, but divided into groups.  Easy to find and with group of last used and favorites.  Necessarily include place holders.

Interactions

Must contain a set number of basic events: click, mouseover, etc.

Be online

Easy download, easy install and autoupdate.  Fine website with fresh info.

View TesterTools dedicated page for this tool.

WireMaster is a user interface (UI) tool for creating wireframes in an open, XML based format.  A wireframe is a basic visual guide used in web design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between it’s pages.

View TesterTools dedicated page for this tool.

WebCorder is a free GUI software testing tool I developed in VB to allow for simple end user web testing.  Essentially the user presses record and navigates their way through a scenario, telling the program to check for text/images along the way and optionally taking screenshots.  At the end of the process you stop recording and save the script.  You can then play back the script either interactively or in batch mode, and the program will generate log files etc.

View TesterTools dedicated page for this tool.

The UI Spy tool enables developers and testers to view and interact with the user interface (UI) elements of an application. By viewing the application’s UI hierarchical structure, property values, and raised events, developers and testers can verify that the UI they are creating is programmatically accessible to assistive technology devices such as screen readers.

UI Spy uses the UI Automation libraries. UI Automation is the new accessibility framework for Microsoft Windows.

Using UI Spy, developers and testers can check an application’s level of accessibility by verifying the following:

• UI Automation property values for UI items.
• Control pattern implementation.
• UI Automation event information.
• Navigation and keyboard focus.

View TesterTools dedicated page for this tool.

If you are looking for alternative of manual testing, then start with iTestBot test automation tool.

iTestBot – interfaceiTestBot is an interface automation testing software with the support of Pascal-like syntax. It allows to create scripts to Test interface of software systems just like human testers would do it. iTestBot does not just emulate mouse clicks or button clicks, the iTestBot allows user to specify some image sample to be found n the screen and do some action with this sample. For instance, it can find image sample and then focus mouse on it or move the mouse relatively.

The software is powerful enough as it use Pascal syntax inside, this means that user can create scripts with variables, cycles (for, until), procedures and functions, include external unit. Check more about Pascal-like syntax in iTestBot.

View TesterTools dedicated page for this tool.