Interesting news out of Egypt today.   The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Egypt
needed to replace their legacy infrastructure with a high performance, scalable
hardware solution to host their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Oracle E-Business Suite.

With 7,000 employees, the folks at Coke needed some big iron to host their system, and chose  two IBM Power™ 570 servers running IBM AIX®. One server hosts the production environment at the main site, while the other hosts the disaster recovery and testing environment at a remote site.

Cool, huh?  Indeed.  Even cooler – they used IBM Rational Performance Tester to test the system before going live to ensure the system could handle the required volume of transactions.

The team ran five predefined scenarios, representing Coca-Cola’s core business, with a load of 1,200 “heavy users”.  The team was able to record and playback test scripts, drive different types of user data against the application, define various user loads, set verification points to validate application usage, and analyze the various performance reports in terms of throughput and user load. Metrics were collected to evaluate the scalability of the proposed platform.

Credit also needs to go to IBM’s Business Partner, BSD Group, who provided the Oracle extension required by IBM Rational Performance Tester to make it possible to test Oracle E-Business applications.

When you’re implementing that type of mission critical system, you absolutely need to be ceratin it works before you go live.  IBM Rational Performance Tester gave Coca-Cola the confidence it needed to make the go live decision.

 

 

Doing a little Rational Software Conference house cleaning, and wanted to share some post conference resources for those that were able to attend and those that could not make it down to Orlando.

Open to all:

• Main tent keynote video replay from Day 1
• Main tent keynote video replay from Day 2
• Main tent keynote slides
• Quality Management track resources

 

For Attendees:

• Conference Presentations (login required)

 

Newly Annouced Beta Programs Open to Everyone

• Rational Quality Manager and Rational Test Lab Manager 2.0
• Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance Tester, Rational Service Tester 8.1

If you attended the Rational Software Conference 2009 you certainly heard about the reality TV software show where three teams competed to complete various software challenges relating to Enterprise Modernization, Business IT Transformation and Embedded Systems.   All good fun.   And then the Rational Tester had a thought:

 

Rational Tester Tweet

 

And – as you can guess, someone dared me to “Vote Green”, Green being the color associated with the Enterprise Modernization team.  The other teams were given Blue and Orange.

Using Rational Performance Tester I started to vote.  I started by emulating  5 users, and was submitting about 50 votes per minute.  One of my Rational friends gave me access to the voting results site so I could monitor my progress.  Unfortunately, it seems I wasn’t the only one “performance testing” the voting system.  Team Orange already had 60,000 votes in the system.  Cheaters.

Realizing that it was going to take more than 50 votes per minute, I upped the anty.  I pushed up to 50 users, and was happily entering about 2,400 votes per minute.  More than enough to surpass the Orange team.  Unfortunately, as I did so, someone leaked my progress to the Orange team.  Their 60,000 started to increase.  Gack.   The race was on.

Now, one approach would have been to just up the volume to 5,000 users.  It would have been effective, but there were two other considerations.  First off, I was concerned the voting server would go down.  As well, I was running over the hotel internet connection, which was not exactly a T1 line.  So I inched up, adding 25 users at a time. Each of my additions was met by an increase on the evil Orange side.  Orange was taking the lead.

By 5 or 6pm, between Orange and Green we were entering anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 votes per minute.  Alas though, I could not keep up.  Orange had “collaborated”, using external “friends” to run submissions from a remote site with far more bandwidth than my little laptop.  Using simple math, I was able to calculate our submission rates, and knew at that point Orange would get the Gold. 

In a last ditch attempt to either crash the server or crush Orange, as I left for our special event at Animal Kingdom, I turned the volume on RPT up to 5,000 users.  I knew this would produce at least one casualty: The Voting Server or the Hotel Internet.  Oh well – you only live once.  As it turns out, the Hotel IT team clipped my internet connection.  When I came home from the event, my vote submissions rate was 0 votes per minute.  I was just shy of 1,000,000 votes.

Over the wireless internet in the hotel, I was able to push Green over the 1M mark, while Orange was still running at maximum capacity. As I write, at 10am Orlando time, the vote is 3,640,479 for Orange, 1,040,419 for Green and 95,770 for Blue.  Blue apparently cheated as well – but they just weren’t very good at it. 

Still, I’m pretty darn impressed with Rational Performance Tester.  I’m only running a little laptop here, over a lousy internet connection, and was able to get 1,000,000 + votes.  My CPU never broke a sweat, happily churning around 30-50%.  My 5,000 users used about 1 GB of RAM – or about 200k per user.  That’s pretty damn scalable.  And I was running from a VMware virtual machine no less!

Hopefully there will be a vote next year…because the Rational Performance Tester dev team has some big iron in the shop.  We will not be defeated again.

More great content in the Quality Management track at the Rational Software Conference 2009.   Got a look at some of the new features for Rational Performance Tester for Web 2.0 and for scalability.   The most interesting thing from those sessions was really how IBM Rational is using Performance Tester to test its own tools.  With so many of the new Rational tools being Web 2.0 based – Quality Manager, Team Concert to name a few – Performance Tester has  a had a great development environment to work against.   So as Rational tweaks Performance Tester for its own purposes, we all benefit.  Same story on scalability – with Performance Tester being used to test WebSphere scalability, we are seeing great advancements in terms of CPU and Memory requirements for load generation that benefit us all.

Lots on Quality Manager today – with a packed Tips & Tricks session from Lew Cote.  Lew even continued his session down in the Expo hall – where he did one on one demos of some great RQM tips.   Using Poster to pump data into RQM and setting mandatory fields for defects, work items and requirements were highlights.  We also heard from Sogeti Netherlands how they have converted a portion of their test management practice from HP Quality Center to Rational Quality Manager.  They outlined all the business licensing  cost reasons for moving as well as the technical path they followed to get their data from Quality Center to Quality Manager. 

In more general topics – attendees learned about strategies for building an effective test team (another packed room for RSC presentation veteran Jim Trentadue) and challenges of testing Service Oriented Applications. 

The day ended with an interesting Rational Functional Tester feature announcement.   Kathy Endres introduced attendees to Dynamic Object Mapping in Rational Functional Tester.  This new feature will really help reduce script maintenance by allowing users to control how Functional Tester keeps track of object references.   Yay Rational!

Ok – the day ended – but the night brought us four more sessions.   Dan Gouveia gave some great practical tips in his session entitled “Be Your Automaiton Team’s Swiss Army Knife”.  It was a great session on how to approach automation from a variety of perspectives.   We also saw some more Performance Tester, when Joe Toomey did a deep dive on performance monitoring and Sharon Weed along with Dawn (Wait 5 seconds) Peters dug in to performance testing for Portals. 

The day ended the way it began, wth Web 2.0 – though this time from a functional perspective.  Web 2.0 is here and we can deal with it well with new enhancements in Rational Functional Tester.

What a day.  What a night.

Busy first day at the Rational Software Conference 2009 in Orlando.   After a high energy keynote featuring the IBM brass, the Quality Management keynote kicked off.  Director of Engineering Dave Klavon spoke about the challenges facing quality management teams today from cost containment, to geographic distribution to the lack of open standards.  The Rational Tester was up next with a plays of the year review for they key elements of the product portfolio: Rational Service, Performance and Functional Tester, Quality Manager and Test Lab Manager.  Then, it came time to take a look ahead.  Jeff Schuster, Director of Product Management outlined the vision for the portfolio and some key products:

• Risk based testing, DOORS requirements integartion and enhanced customizable reporting in Rational Quality Manager
• Service Level reporting in Rational Performance Tester
• Storyboard Testing with Rational Functional Tester

Jeff showed product demonstrations of the DOORS requirements management integration to Quality Manager and the Storyboard testing.  The storyboad testing in particular was the highlight, enhancing Rational Functional Tester tests with a new view that describes test steps in plain english, supplemented with active screenshots.  The real kicker came when Jeff showed how a test could be edited by modifying the plain english rendering or by working against the screenshots. 

Product managers Brian Massey, Dennis Moya and Fariz Saracevic followed right after they keynote drilling down on each of these new enhancements, and letting customers see the real technical gears behind the scenes.

Beyond the new product announcements, there were some great session on Tips & Tricks for Performance Testing from one of the tool engineers, Kevin Mooney and a fabulous session on Collaboration Strategies for Agile Quality Management from Anne Burke.  The discussion in the Agile session was great – with attendees obviously eager to implement some of the Agile strategies Anne outlined as part of their “2 week iteration” Agile approach.  It was absolutely refreshing to hear how the testers on Anne’s team were so tightly integrated with the developers, customers, documentation and all other team contributors.  Fascinating stuff.  Other topics included discussions on SOA, Test Lab Management for globalization testing, a great in depth look at the import mechanism for RQM and more Agile development with Rational Functional Tester. 

It was  a jam packed day.  This week is going to be tough!

BETA BETA BETA BETA

As promised in the Rational Tester’s Quality Management Keynote presentation at the Rational Software Conference 2009 – we have new beta tools available for everyone to download.  Here’s the links:

 

Rational Functional Tester – Rational Service Tester – Rational Performance Tester

Rational Quality Manager – Rational Test Lab Manager

 

For those that can wait, a new beta of Rational Quality Manager will be published very soon.  Check back shortly - we’ll have the link here.

Enjoy the rest of the conference – we’ll be updating the blog tomorrow with a wrap up of Day 1.

In reviewing presentations for the IBM Rational Software Conference 2009, the Rational Tester came across a very strong presentation from Kathy Endres, a test architect at IBM Rational itself.

The Rational Functional Tester object map is the device used to maintain GUI object definitions for Rational Functional Tester tests.  It’s a powerful tool that maintains a catalog of all GUI objects, and it’s the mechanism Rational Functional Tester uses to find objects on screen during playback.

Managing the object map, under most circumstances, is a low maintenance activity.  Many users never need to go in there.  But there are circumstances where a little tweaking can go a long way.  In the presentation Kathy examines some of these situations such as using the Object Recognition Properties configuration tool to change the way Rational Functional Tester recognizes its objects.

Rational Functional Tester Object Recognition Configuration Tool

 

Kathy also covers the very powerful tool of Dynamic Test Objects.  Rational Functional Tester Dynamic Test Objects are a great tool to use on very dynamic, ever changing, GUI interfaces as these objects are not anchored to a specific object hierarchy.  This topic is probably worth a post on its own. 

Kathy will be presenting her work at the Rational Software Conference 2009 during the first week of June in Orlando.  If you’re interested in attending the conference there is currently a secret discount code on the Rational Software Conference Facebook page.  Find it – you’ll save yourself some big bucks!

Save $300 on the Rational Software Conference http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/rsdc/register.html

The Rational Software Conference Spring Fever discount ends today!  If you’re thinking about attending the conference this year – this is your last chance to get the discount.  You won’t get a better offer than this.  Now is the time.

The Rational Software Conference 2009 is set for Orlando, Florida May 1 to June 4.   The Rational Tester just got word that the conference has managed to lock down renowned testing expert Jeff Bocarsly, Vice President, Division Manager for Functional Testing Services, RTTS.  Jeff will be delivering a presentation on Internationalization Testing on Wednesday June 3, at 3pm.   The session, based on content from the upcoming Rational Functional Tester book, will discuss  how to set up Rational Functional Tester for building and running a suite of internationalized tests, so that your test automation can cycle through multiple language versions.   This is a common problem with modern applications, and a session for which we expect a large audience.

Getting renowned speakers such as Jeff is a real coup for the conference, as he is one of the most experienced functional test automation professionals out there.  If you haven’t already signed up for the conference, you still have a few days to get in on the $300 Spring Fever discount.  Register by April 30 with the promotion code APRIL and save $300 on your registration fee!   See you there!

One of Rational’s implementation experts contacted me the other day looking for information on testing Service Oriented Applications (SOA).  In particular, he had been looking for a webinar we gave to the Rational Community.

Typically, whenever I create some content I try to mention it here – as I often point to this site for reference materials.  However, this time, I had forgotten to post this particular presentation.  So, let’s correct this omission.

The Chaos of SOA Application Testing  is a webinar I presented back in January to members fo the Rational community.  In that session, we explored strategies, tools and techniques that can be used to effectively validate the fitness of SOA applications.

We specifically touched on:

• SOA application business function fulfillment
• Component functional and performance validation
• Post deployment SOA application performance and quality

The webinar begins with a quick slide presentation the does a full demonstration of Rational Service Tester.  Hope you find it helpful.