Archive for December 16th, 2008
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Steve Souders from Google: “Focus on front-end performance”
No comments · Posted by Patrick Lightbody in Load Testing Tips
Steve Souders recently wrote up an excellent article on how to build high performance web sites. His advice is to focus on what the end-user experiences, which means focusing on everything from the HTML construction to browser caching to network infrastructure and delivery. He provides 14 “rules” to follow and it’s a great eye opener!
Steve is also the author of YSlow, a plugin for the popular Firebug tool. We strongly encourage all our customers to use Firebug and YSlow when doing any load and performance testing on their site. They are great tools to go along with Selenium IDE and BrowserMob.
PS: We’re going to be publishing a blog post on Firebug soon, so we’ll cover some of the topics that Steve mentions and how they relate to load testing with BrowserMob.
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16
Open Source: You don’t have to hide from it
No comments · Posted by Patrick Lightbody in Industry News
Sanjay Dange wrote up an excellent summary of why QA professionals don’t have to hide from open source. You can find the article on his blog and reproduced at Test Republic. I made the following comment to his article and I think it’s worthwhile to share here as well, as it explains why we set out to create BrowserMob:
As a contributor to Selenium, an open source functional testing tool, I have also seen a lot more willingness to try out open source technologies.
I see the biggest challenge for adoption by QA engineers is the lack of documentation in open source. Normally, developers can pick up open source by just reading the source code, so documentation suffers. This has allowed libraries and frameworks to flourish.
But for tools, documentation is more critical. Unfortunately, this is usually the last thing to get attention in open source.
I see a chance for success with hybrid approaches: commercial companies that offer lower cost services and products that leverage open source. The commercial companies can provide support/documentation/training, but can keep their prices low and offer products that don’t have vendor lock in.
This is what I’m doing with my company, BrowserMob, which provides on-demand, low-cost load testing that uses real web browsers. We leverage Selenium and the power of cloud computing to offer a better product at lower prices. Without open source, our company couldn’t exist!
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