Xceptance, Inc. is hiring a Quality Assurance Test Lead in the Greater Boston Area. Take a look at our job posting.

The German computer magazine c’t recently published the results of their recurring income study among IT personnel.

The hourly rates for knowledge and skills list XLT – Xceptance LoadTest – in second place, right after DB2 and before Windows Embedded.

Yes, we were a little surprised to see XLT skills in such high demand. It encourages and motivates us, because we know that we are on the right track with XLT to deliver an flexible but simple and efficient tool for load and performance testing, as well as regression testing.

What does this mean for you as developer, tester, or IT decider? Get yourself a copy of XLT, take a closer look at it, train your developers, or learn it yourself, because others already have and they are enjoying a competitive advantage.

Source: Zahltag – c’t 06/2012, page 94

Sometimes authentication is necessary before a test case can be executed. While HtmlUnit based tests can easily enter and confirm authentication requests, most browser based tests, cannot workaround the dialog. This is a browser security measure to prevent automated data capture and/or data entering. WebDriver for Firefox delivers a solution for that problem, but IE and Chrome rely on a manual interaction with the browser before the test automation can run.

The following steps describe a solution for the authentication problem and how to run a script test case as WebDriver based test. The key to this solution is the usage of Sikuli, an image based testing tool that directly interacts with the screen to find the right elements by using the screen.

Or in other words, the test automation controls the browser, not the operating system, while Sikuli controls the display of the operating system and uses the keyboard and mouse to control any program.

• Download Sikuli tool for your platform (http://sikuli.org)
• Extract the zip file
• Add the path to Sikuli lib directory to your environment settings
• Add sikuli-script.jar to your project
• Implement a Java class as shown below
• Take the necessary screenshots of the elements to use

import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.ie.InternetExplorerDriver;
import com.xceptance.xlt.api.engine.scripting.AbstractWebDriverScriptTestCase;
import com.xceptance.xlt.engine.scripting.XlteniumScriptInterpreter;
import org.sikuli.script.*;

public class TfoobarIE extends AbstractWebDriverScriptTestCase
{
    /**
     * Constructor starts internet explorer
     */
    public TfoobarIE()
    {
        super(new InternetExplorerDriver(), "http://xlt.xceptance.com");
    }

    /**
     * Main test method solves authentication problem and executes xlt script developer script
     */
    @Test
    public void test() throws Throwable
    {
    	// create Sikuli screen object
    	Screen s = new Screen();

    	// open page with xlt
    	open("/demo/");

    	// wait 5 seconds for the image with the username input field
    	s.wait("./img/username_input_field.jpg",5);

    	// type username "demo" into the input field
    	s.type("demo");    

    	// type password into the password field
    	s.type("./img/password_input_field.jpg","demoomed!");

    	// click ok button
    	s.click("./img/ok_button.jpg");

    	// execute xlt script developer script
    	XlteniumScriptInterpreter interpreter = new XlteniumScriptInterpreter(getWebDriver());
    	interpreter.executeScript("Tfoobar");
    }
}

Do not forget to make the appropriate screenshots of the buttons and input fields (see code) and of course, adjust the path and login data. Have fun and watch the magic happening. For more information how Sikuli works, please visit sikuli.org.

The upcoming Xceptance LoadTest 4.2 will discontinue the direct support of JRuby as a programming language for writing test cases. This will not change the way Java and JRuby interact and therefore you can still use all Java components and integrate them into your JRuby-based test suite. You can also still write test cases in Ruby and use XLT-APIs.

You can read about this feature, in case you are not sure whether or not you will be affected by this change: XLT 3.3.0 JRuby support release note.

Version 4.2 of Xceptance LoadTest will not continue the JRuby package anymore (jruby.jar). The test execution scripts for JRuby-based tests and all demo test cases will be removed as well.

If you have any questions regarding this change, please do not hesitate to contact our support team directly.

XLT 4.1.8 has been released. It contains a couple of improvements and bug fixes. You can get the latest version here: https://lab.xceptance.de/releases/xlt/4.1.8/.

These are the two most important changes.

Optimized scanning CSS rules

XLT simulates the download behavior of a browser as close as possible. With com.xceptance.xlt.css.download.images set to onDemand, XLT carefully considers the download of image resources referred to in CSS files. It checks all CSS rules if they apply to all elements in the DOM tree and, if so, extracts the resource information for later download. This process was previously very expensive and ran for up to several seconds when a page was complex and a lot of CSS rules had to be matched. This has been optimized heavily.

Configurable retry behavior for keep-alive connections

If persistent connections (keep-alive) are enabled, test cases might failed sporadically with an exception such as:
java.lang.RuntimeException: org.apache.http.NoHttpResponseException: The target server failed to respond

This exception occurs only when the request was sent while the connection was about to be closed on the server side at the same time.

The underlying HttpClient retries requests if the connection was closed by the server. However, by default it retries only idempotent operations such as GET and HEAD, but not POST and PUT. In order to avoid these connection errors, the user can now configure whether non-idempotent operations are to be retried as well. Common browsers seem to use the same behavior and most certainly assume that the server did not start to process the request when it closes the connection immediately without responding with a proper HTTP status code.

A new boolean property com.xceptance.xlt.http.retry.nonIdempotentRequests in config/default.properties controls whether or not operations such as PUT and POST are retried in case of certain networking problems. Note that idempotent operations are always retried.

Xceptance is announcing the availability of Xceptance LoadTest (XLT) version 4.1.7. This is an update release and includes smaller improvements and defect fixes. The update is recommended for everyone.

Improvements

• Script Developer: Breakpoints can be set at a module call now. They have been moved to the first command of the module before.
• Runtime Engine: WebDriver has been updated to version 2.16.1.
• Script Developer: Now it supports new HTML 5 input elements, such as email and date, during record and playback.

Fixes

• Runtime Engine: When running multiple test cases at once from Eclipse or with Ant, the values measured for each test case were always stored in the timers.csv file of the first test case. This was a development mode issue only.
• Master controller: Agent controller urls are now checked to ensure that they are unique.
• Script Developer: The base url text box was not correctly updated when the url was changed via the Edit Dialog before.
• Script Developer: WaitFor commands included a small pause before checking the condition even though the condition was already fulfilled. This pause has been removed.
• Script Developer: Using a mouse wheel for scrolling now works in Firefox 9.
• Runtime Engine: When getting the value of an option element, the HtmlUnitDriver does not fall back to the option’s text content in case the option does not specify a value attribute. This behavior is mandatory according to the HTML specification. Fixed in the XltDriver until a fix is provided by the underlying project.
• Runtime Engine: For input elements of type hidden, HtmlUnit’s API method isDisplayed() returned true although hidden inputs are never visible to the user.

All details and the full download can be found here: https://lab.xceptance.de/releases/xlt/4.1.7/

We just released Xceptance LoadTest version 4.1.6. This upgrade release delivers small bugfixes and support for Firefox 9. Additionally you can specify an individual temporary download and upload directory for master and agents now. For the first time, you  also get an XLT-AMI for the new US-West Oregon data center of Amazon.

All details and the full download can be found here: https://lab.xceptance.de/releases/xlt/4.1.6/

This is a nice summary of web application security related technologies, processes, and development patterns: Design Guidelines for Secure Web Applications. A little .NET heavy, but most stuff is generally applicable.

If you read and like the above information, you should not miss the OWASP web security guidelines. This is a must read for every tester and developer. OWASP Guide Project:

Web application security is an essential component of any successful project, whether open source PHP applications, web services such as straight through processing, or proprietary business web sites. Hosters (rightly) shun insecure code, and users shun insecure services that lead to fraud. The aim of this Development Guide is to allow businesses, developers, designers and solution architects to produce secure web applications. If done from the earliest stages, secure applications cost about the same to develop as insecure applications, but are far more cost effective in the long run.

Unlike other forms of security (such as firewalls and secure lockdowns), web applications have the ability to make a skilled attacker rich, or make the life of a victim a complete misery. At this highest level of the OSI software map, traditional firewalls and other controls simply do not help. The application itself must be self-defending. The Development Guide can help you get there. The Development Guide has been written to cover all forms of web application security issues, from old hoary chestnuts such as SQL Injection, through modern concerns such as AJAX, phishing, credit card handling, session fixation, cross-site request forgeries, compliance, and privacy issues…

Smashing Magazine lists a couple of free and commercial tools to cover cross-browser testing:

Good news: very powerful free testing tools are available for Web designers today. Some are more user-friendly than others, and some have significantly better user interfaces. Don’t expect much (if any) support with these tools. But if you’d rather not spend extra money on testing, some great options are here as well.

Read the full article…

By the way, our own tool Xceptance LoadTest (XLT) offers a way to run cross-browser functional tests. XLT leverages WebDriver, a multi-browser API for automation. WebDriver does not support all browser and does not equally support all browser well, but we tried to iron out as much as possible. On top of it, you can use the XLT Script Developer to easily create automation scripts and run them either using our own scripting language or export them to Java to directly run them on the WebDriver-API.

You can download Xceptance LoadTest for free with no strings attached from our web site: www.xceptance-loadtest.com.

If you are looking for Firefox 5.0 support when using XLT script developer, you will get it with version 4.1 of XLT. This version is available here.