When is a hack not a hack?

We all get raises at the same time of year. The buzz is big around the time it happens… whispers of flat 2% or 1% across the board, rumors that “we’re all getting screwed”… you know, standard stuff. They are entered into our payroll software before they’re communicated to us, but we don’t have access, and there’s always a 7-10 day period between the decision and the communication. What, do we have to wait until we get the check to see what it’s going to be?

Well, in fact, no we don’t.

Our “heartbeat” page pings all test servers every minute, letting you know which ones are up and running and which are dead. This allows us to check the server’s availability before we execute automated tests. It’s a Perl script, which reads a text file containing the names and URLs, etc. of all the servers we care about, and puts the results into an XML file.

My team has recently taken on the challenge of conducting performance testing for our product. Performance and web-app security testing have been both been put under the same umbrella. That’s great–lots of efficiencies to be gained from our different skills, but at the same time, I’m no expert in either field. I have a perf test engineer who is good with Empirix e-Load, and he’s teaching me how we do things. We have a couple of books (including this one), and we’ve received some tool-specific training, but none of it has been enough as yet to convince me that we’re doing everything we can to test page load times accurately.

This is also one of the reasons we haven’t been posting much. With new responsibility comes new drains on time.

One of the benefits of using Web Extensibility Add-ins is that you get a performance gain in running tests vs using the old WebElement method. For a demonstration, I wrote a basic WebExt add-in that only has one class defined: Div. Div is any object whose tagName is “DIV”, so it is the equivalent of WebElement(”tagName:=DIV”). You can download it here. All you have to do to use it in your QTP 9.5 environment is extract that zip file into “C:\progfiles\hp\QuickTest Professional\dat\Extensibility\Web” and restart QTP. Make sure to check the “rawElements” add-in on QTP’s splash screen.

During the Web Extensibility talk at HP Software Universe, somebody asked me to post the code for childNodeByID. This is a javascript function that is useful in Web Extensibility projects. It lets you find the child of a DOM object that has a specific id attribute.

At the time, I said this function was only a few lines long. I was wrong. Somebody with more javascript experience could probably golf this down to a few lines, but my version is pretty long.

HP just gave a revealing presentation about the next version of QuickTest Pro. It is codenamed Atlantis, and it will probably be called QuickTest Pro 10.0. QTP 10 is targeted to be released in the beginning of 2009.

I’ll break down some of the features that were discussed.

I’ve already met a couple of you at HP Software Universe, and I’m interested in meeting as many Inquisition readers as possible. If you happen to see me, please come introduce yourself.

I look just like this, except I’m not wearing glasses.

Caleb Sima from SPI dynamics is presenting on the main stage. Demoing SQL injection. This is pretty common stuff, but his presentation is making it much more accessible than others I’ve seen.

He showed SPI’s SQL Injector tool, and I could feel the fear coming from part of the audience. I suspect he is going to ease their fear by telling them how they can buy his product.

I’m waiting for the first HPSU keynote to start. They are playing some pop music and actors dressed as zombies are roaming through the audience. I don’t know who is talking at this session yet.

1:12p - Now a blindfolded tightrope walker is going over the stage while the zombies below try to get high enough to get at him. Presumably to make him part of their zombie army.

I’ve just checked in to the swank Palazzo hotel in Las Vegas for HP Software Universe.

I don’t know if it qualifies as live blogging, but I will be posting a few updates throughout the week about goings on here.

UPDATE:

You can also read coverage of HPSU 2008 on loadtester.com. They also have a HPSU bingo card for those attending. One of the squares on the card is in the title of my presentation: Web 2.0.

Short Story - we had a great time and learned a lot. It probably didn’t suit us as well as it could have (since we’re not currently QC customers–just QTP), but a few of the track sessions were excellent. There was one I would even call “validating” to both our approach to Mercury’s products, and to the direction we’re headed in as a QA organization.

Last week, Mercury posted a file for download called "QTP Expert Series - Issue 1". I saw it today and it interested me enough to download it. I'm certainly glad I did, because inside I found a spicy* little example framework called SAFFRON.