Software Testing Tools Blog – Testertools

SearchSoftwareQuality.com,  the online community for developers, architects and executives interested in building secure and quality software have released a great article on Software development bugs and how to prevent.

The article, titled ‘Software development bugs: How to identify and prevent them’, the  magazine has a Q & A with Dror Helper, to identify proper techniques to find those bugs early in the cycle, when they are least potent.

What types of bugs are typically introduced in each step of the application lifecycle?

An application lifecycle can be divided into five stages: requirements, design, development, testing and deployment. In each stage, a different kind of bug can be introduced. In the requirement stage, we can “forget” one of the requirements which would result in an incomplete product while a bug in the design stage would probably mean that the product does not work as intended.

For more details please read: Software development bugs: How to identify and prevent them

Laplink Software, Inc. today officially released PCmover® Windows® 8 Beta Assistant™, a free tool that makes testing Windows 8 more efficient and easily allows users to migrate selected programs, files and settings from a Windows 7 PC to a Windows 8 PC.

PCmover Windows 8 Beta Assistant is available now as a free download on Laplink’s website and can be used to perform an unlimited number of migrations at no charge prior to July 2012.

Beta Assistant provides a unique solution that allows users to move selected programs, files and settings from a Windows 7 or Windows 8 machine into a new machine running Windows 8. PCmover is the number one best-selling migration software in the world and is the only software that moves installed programs (as well as files, settings and user profiles) from an old PC to a new one. Unlike PCmover, Microsoft’s Windows Easy Transfer has never supported the process of migrating installed apps. Without PCmover, users must find old CDs, re-download applications, and locate serial numbers and keys to manually install programs when setting up a new PC.

“Setting up a new PC is a nightmare without PCmover,” explained Laplink Director of Marketing Neil Minetto. “The amount of time it takes to set up a new PC is staggering, not to mention all the hassle. With PCmover, users can have a new PC up and running in no time, and getting used to the new PC is much easier because PCmover transfers the personality and functionality of the old PC along with the rest of the data.”

PCmover Windows 8 Beta Assistant is compatible with physical or virtual machines (VMs) provided that both the source and destination are 64-bit operating systems. Beta Assistant will work with the Developer Preview as well as all of the upcoming Beta releases and RC (release candidate) builds. And, as new Beta and RC builds are released, Beta Assistant can be used to migrate between those builds, even to and from the same PC providing a fast and easy “Beta Upgrade” path.

“By using PCmover to migrate Windows 7 to a Windows 8 computer or VM, automating what is normally a series of manual processes, testers and developers stand to save hundreds of hours,” commented Laplink CTO Jack Wilson. “To conduct tests of Windows 8, it is typical for a user to provision several different Windows 8 VMs complete with a unique arrangement of development tools, debug software, SDKs and environmental variables. PCmover allows the user to quickly jump into the testing phase, using the same tools, software and environment they used in Windows 7.”

Laplink offers multiple editions of PCmover to serve the needs of every user and every scenario. From Home to Professional to Enterprise, PCmover expedites any migration scenario, whether a single consumer PC to refreshing thousands of business PCs. And, PCmover is safe to use as it doesn’t make any changes on the source PC and won’t overwrite anything on the destination PC. This means there is no risk to the user’s current environment and their data will remain intact on the old PC, preventing any risk of data loss.

All versions of PCmover are available at www.laplink.com, while a consumer version can be found in most major software retailers in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan.

A free utility that you can use to demonstrate SQL injection vulnerabilities in web apps has been released by web security specialists, NT OBJECTives.

NTO SQL Invader is interesting because it isn’t designed to find the vulnerability; instead, the aim is to give you a way to show how the vulnerability could be exploited.

NTO SQL Invader Provides Pen Testers and Developers the Ability to Quickly and Easily Exploit and Demonstrate SQL Injection Vulnerabilities in Web Applications
NT OBJECTives, a provider of automated, comprehensive and accurate Web Application security software, services and SaaS, today announced the availability of NTO SQL Invader, a free tool which provides pen testers and developers the ability to quickly and easily exploit and demonstrate SQL Injection vulnerabilities in Web applications.

Most organizations understand that SQL Injection vulnerabilities put their sensitive data at risk and it has been the dominant method used in this year’s high-profile web application attacks; with millions of sites attacked in 2011.

Despite the fact that SQL Injection is well documented and there are tools to discover the vulnerabilities, it has been very difficult to determine if the vulnerability can actually be exploited because most existing SQL Injection testing tools are executed from a command line, lack an intuitive user interface or are no longer supported. Without the ability to clearly demonstrate the exploitability of a vulnerability, remediation efforts are often delayed and friction between security and development teams surfaces. NTO SQL Invader allows pen testers and developers to quickly and easily leverage a vulnerability to view the list of records, tables and user accounts on the back-end database.

With a few simple clicks in NTO SQL Invader, a user can exploit a web application vulnerability that was discovered manually or from a Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tool like NTOSpider. NTO SQL Invader works as a stand-alone tool and also includes integration with NTOSpider’s reporting technology to assist pen testers and developers in quickly identifying and validating discovered vulnerabilities. While reviewing and confirming results from NTOSpider, users can leverage NTO SQL Invader to provide a polished, real-world proof-of-concept for the discovered SQL Injection vulnerabilities.
“Accurate vulnerability identification is a crucial and challenging task but it is only half the battle,” says Dan Kuykendall, co-CEO and Chief Technology Officer of NT OBJECTives. “We wanted to support organizations in their analysis and remediation efforts by providing an easy to use tool that enables penetration testers to demonstrate how these vulnerabilities can be exploited. We felt it was important to provide a free and useful tool to our customers and to the entire community.”

SQUARE Corporation, a leading enabler of smart, connected devices, today announced the availability of TestQuest 10, a new product within the Company’s premier test automation technology suite that brings together key strengths of TestQuest Pro and TestQuest CountDown and adds new functionality to create a new and powerful test automation solution that is unsurpassed in the marketplace.

The key technology improvements included in the new TestQuest 10 solution help application developers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) get their products to market quickly, saving time and money, by reducing test costs and complexity while also increasing software and device quality.

“TestQuest 10 provides customers with a test automation solution that is the best of both worlds,” said John Traynor, Vice President Products for Bsquare, “combining the flexible, extensible test creation of TestQuest Pro and the distributed, scalable test execution of TestQuest CountDown. In addition, we did extensive product research and added many of our customers’ top requests. The result is a solution that provides greater breadth and depth of automated testing while delivering tremendous value to customers.”

TestQuest 10 reduces the cost and complexity of test case development by integrating with the most popular commercial software development environment, Microsoft Visual Studio, as well as popular software version control systems. This integration helps customers get started quickly without needing to learn an entirely new set of tools. TestQuest 10 supports test development using any language that supports the .NET common language runtime (CLR), including C#, Visual Basic, IronPython, IronRuby, and others.

TestQuest 10 lowers the cost of each test pass while increasing test execution accuracy. Scalable automation enables test cases to be reused multiple times across multiple devices and also reduces the mental and physical strain caused by repetitive manual testing. Testing productivity can be further increased through distributed test execution, which provides customers with the ability to test using geographically distributed development and test teams. Additional productivity savings are gained by the product integrating with Microsoft Test and many popular third-party and open source testing tools which allows teams familiar with these tools to be immediately productive with TestQuest 10.

“The TestQuest 10 solution mimics the actual type of interaction a human would have with a device without the limitations, strain and errors associated with manual testing. The automation features in TestQuest 10 can also improve the quality of testing,” Traynor continued. “It provides testing that’s similar to what would be encountered in the real world — across multiple environments, in different geographies, and with varied hardware — so developers and device manufacturers can detect defects that might not otherwise arise in a single location or test environment.”

TestQuest 10 accelerates customers’ time to market by allowing test development and test execution to start with desktop prototypes, device emulators and simulators, even before production hardware is available. Customers can then transition testing to production devices and execute tests without changing any underlying test code.

TestQuest 10 supports test development and execution under 32- and 64-bit Windows 7 environments and various target device types including those running Android and Windows Embedded platforms. The new product also features improved intelligent text recognition (ITR) across all supported language sets.

The additional language capabilities in the product demonstrate the Bsquare commitment to internationalization and localization, especially for the Asia Pacific market. Compared to prior test automation products, customers will see up to a 92% processing speed improvement for major European languages and up to a 40% increase in accuracy for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Additional information about TestQuest is available at: http://bsquare.com/automated-testing-tools.aspx.

Hypebot.com have featured a great article on Benchmarking tools for Twitter Use.

In the Article, titled  3 Top Twitter Tools To Measure & Grow Traffic, the sites some exciting tools that can measure users and traffic volumes.

In the challenging terrain of 2012 that lies before us, understanding the impact of our social media activities is a crucial aspect of knowing where best to spend our valuable time. Here are three Twitter tools, TweetReach, Twitalyzer and #KnowYourFollowers, with a focus on their free options that can help in analyzing such areas as audience reach, impact and demographics.

Though these tools can be used to feed the greedy monster that only wants to see higher numbers, their real usefulness lies in understanding more about one’s audience on Twitter and how that might be used to build the audience for one’s music.

For more information please read 3 Top Twitter Tools To Measure & Grow Traffic

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

Sys-con.com havereleased a great article on Mobile Application Testing.   The article touches on why addressing factors  can help users triumph in the “mobile arms race”

Titled “Five Overlooked Factors of Mobile Application Performance” the Article is written by Mark Tomlinson

Too often, little consideration is given to performance testing in the context of mobile application testing. We are reaching a tipping point in how consumers are accessing the Internet, with more than 50% of users expected to access the Web via a mobile device by the end of 2013. With this increase in mobile usage comes the need (really, a requirement) for organizations to meet an increased expectation in application performance.

To read the full article please read: http://www.sys-con.com/node/2116107

Microsoft removed the Data Analysis Toolpak from Excel 2011 for the Macintosh in 2008, eliminating statistical tools such as ANOVA, t test, F Test, and regression analysis. Hypothesis testing using these tools is a key element in advanced problem solving, so the loss of these tools has been a major challenge for practitioners of Six Sigma who use the Macintosh, but not anymore.

The QI Macros Lean Six Sigma SPC software has supported Excel for the Macintosh since 1998. The Analysis Toolpak has been rewritten for Excel 2011 and includes many previously unavailable features like 1-sample t tests, Fishers Exact test, Levene’s test, normality tests, non-normality tests, and proportion tests. There’s even a statistics wizard to simplify hypothesis testing.

The QI Macros are an add-in for Microsoft Excel that automate all of the charts and diagrams required for statistical process control (SPC) and lean Six Sigma. The QI Macros consist of four parts: 30 charts and two “chart wizards” that use existing Excel data to create Pareto, control charts, and histograms; more than 90 fill-in-the-blank templates for lean Six Sigma; a statistics wizard; and data transformation tools such as the PivotTable wizard that automates data analysis.

icrosoft removed the Data Analysis Toolpak from Excel 2011 for the Macintosh in 2008, eliminating statistical tools such as ANOVA, t test, F Test, and regression analysis. Hypothesis testing using these tools is a key element in advanced problem solving, so the loss of these tools has been a major challenge for practitioners of Six Sigma who use the Macintosh, but not anymore.

SmartBear Software , a provider of software development, testing, and monitoring tools, has released LoadComplete 2.0, the latest version of SmartBear’s load-testing tool for web and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Following are highlights of the new features in LoadComplete 2.0:

• Support for load testing RIAs and associated protocols and formats. LoadComplete 2 supports load testing of web applications built with Adobe Flash, Flex, Ajax, and Silverlight, and supports the Action Message Format (AMF), XML (SOAP) and binary XML, and JSON web protocols and data formats. Additionally, LoadComplete can now decode data from server responses and encode values into further requests. Users can view, change, or parameterize traffic test data using the graphical tree view.
• Enhanced point-and-click automation for parameterizing test data in AMF, JSON, SOAP, XML, and Silverlight data formats. An improved Data Selectors feature now lets you insert data not only into URL parameters or into parameters of POST multipart/form-data or form-url encoded requests, but also into an arbitrary place in a body of any subsequent request.
• Higher load-generation capacity, enabling 25 percent more virtual users per node. LoadComplete Remote Agent now supports simulating up to 400 virtual users on a computer node.
• Enhanced reporting capabilities. The new “waterfall” graphs, Slow Pages and Slow Pages (Average) graphs in the Report Top 10 tab, now include detailed execution time of pages’ requests. You can use this information to analyze the order and duration of page requests and find performance bottlenecks. Additionally, you can now export test results to PDF or MHT (HTML) files or send them to the printer directly from the Report panel.
• Logging complete requests and responses. LoadComplete now saves the contents of all simulated requests and the contents of responses to these requests received from the server, displaying this information in two new test log panels: Request Body and Response Body.
• Enhanced support for ASP.NET applications. LoadComplete 2 improves built-in support for .axd file requests to eliminate the need for any manual data manipulation.

SmartBear Software today announced that AlertSite, the company’s Web and mobile performance monitoring solution, will support testing on both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Organizations can now test, monitor and improve how their website is performing across both browsers to ensure customers are getting an optimal user experience, no matter their browser preference.

The AlertSite built-into-the-browser transaction recorder captures and plays back user events to measure the end-user experience exactly as it unfolds in the browser. Now users can record any multi-step transaction or click stream and play it back on multiple browsers to simulate user experience. Unlike other Web monitoring tools that require separate recording processes for each browser, AlertSite users can simply record once and monitor from both Firefox and Internet Explorer across multiple locations.

Bojan Simic, President and Principal Analyst at TRAC Research, said, “TRAC’s research shows that the Web browser is the number one “blind spot” in the application delivery chain. As the amount of application component processing in the browser is increasing, organizations are realizing that they need to gain more visibility into how the performance of the Web browser impacts the quality of user experience. AlertSite’s announcement allows organizations to address one of the key challenges for application performance monitoring and enables them to have more control over the quality of Web experience.”

Ken Godskind, Vice President of Monitoring Solutions for SmartBear Software, said, “Today there are more browser options than ever, and each browser has very unique qualities that can impact load times of your application. We realize the importance for online businesses to know exactly how their website is performing no matter which browser their customers prefer, and today, Internet Explorer and Firefox have the largest share of the browser market. Our website monitoring service offers a fast and simple way for users to get a multi-browser snapshot of their website’s performance to help them manage the user experience. We plan to add new browsers in the coming months as we continue to provide our customers with the most comprehensive insight to improve their online performance.”

AlertSite monitors Web and mobile performance from more than 70 data centers located on every major continent. Internet Explorer 8 testing is now available from six global locations. Multi-browser support is also available for AlertSite’s Web Test on Demand, an instant way to get detailed insight into how websites and applications are performing at any moment from a specific monitoring location.

Availability

AlertSite Multi-Browser Support is available immediately. To learn more, or to try free for 30-days, visit smartbear.com/multi-browser-web-performance-monitoring/ .

Webinar Registration

Join SmartBear on Thursday, December 1, 2011, at 1:00 p.m. for our free Webinar, “How to Start Monitoring Your Website with Internet Explorer.”