A number of companies are taking the hassle of analysing your Web
site performance from the customer's point of view.Danny Bradbury
reports.
No one likes a Web page that falls over, but very few people like
to test software either. Code analysis and load testing can be
tedious tasks, for which many development teams are not properly
trained.
A number of companies have launched online testing and
performance monitoring services to try and overcome this problem
and make it as easy as possible for companies to stop their Web
applications from crashing.
One such company is ImagoQA, a UK-based software testing
consultancy that has just rolled out two online testing services.
Web site Workout and Web site Watchout are designed to handle the
pre- and post-deployment periods of Web site development.
Workout is primarily a load testing service, which hits a Web
site with queries to see how much it can stand. The Watchout
service monitors the performance of an Internet site on a periodic
basis. It will be particularly useful for analysing trends in Web
site performance, says marketing director Colin Willes.
The company charges roughly £10,000 for the Workout service for
a 500-user system, and then £2.50 per user up to 2,500 concurrent
users.
Problem analysis
Israeli software testing company Mercury Interactive has
launched a similar service in the form of Topaz Activewatch, a
hosted Web site performance and monitoring service based on its
Topaz 2.0 Web application management solution.
A free three-month subscription to the service which will
monitor your Web site is available. For the free subscription,
register before 30 June at www.topazactivewatch.
mercuryinteractive.com.
Good Web site testing isn't just about load balancing, however.
Making sure that the code is robust will avoid visitors to the site
experiencing user errors, which could be embarrassing for the
company, or even pose a potential security risk.
Reasoning Software has just announced an online testing service,
which checks out C++, Java and even Cobol code (the latter will be
useful for checking enhancements to legacy systems that support a
middle tier e-commerce application).
John Rodford, UK managing director for the company, explains
that the current testing service is designed to inspect code for
crash-causing defects. Customers submit their code on his Web site,
where it is inspected against a predefined set of rules. A list of
bugs is then returned in two or three days.
The company does not carry out testing for logical errors by
using testing scripts, however. It concentrates purely on analysing
the lines of code provided.
"Even with the best test data sets in the world, you won't test
every data path," he says. "But if you inspect the software early
on, you'll get the majority of the bugs in one fell swoop."
Vital
Other types of testing, including user acceptance testing and
testing logical paths through the system, are a vital part of any
software testing process. The company doesn't offer online testing
services for other back end systems, such as SAP, which might also
support a Web application at the data layer.
Rodford says that software testing becomes particularly
important as Web sites change. One prevailing characteristic among
transactional Internet applications is that new functionality is
being added all the time to reflect changing business models.
"It's a good thing to re-test. When something is inserted,
errors creep in," he says. "We offer customers a subscription
service, where we inspect so many lines of code a month, or
quarter. It's like a mobile phone contract."
Such testing services are invaluable, and will be useful for
companies which do not have the internal resources to test
applications in-house. Nevertheless, more extensive testing using
data sets would be appropriate for any company that is 100% serious
about its Internet business.