There certainly are things out there that money can’t buy, just like the Beatles once sang. However, you might agree with us that money can do good (things), if managed appropriately.
With the company anniversary in mind we at Xceptance sought to combine both the good deeds and a great company gift. That’s how we found out about the idea of a ‘Wortpatenschaft‘ (engl.: “word sponsorship”), a campaign dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the German language (in cooperation with the German nonprofit association Deutsche Sprache e.V., Dortmund).
Ten years and 230 projects later it’s time to look back at the beginnings of Xceptance. Let us take you on a quick trip down memory lane!
The Story
In the beginning there was a small group of four colleagues who decided to take a chance and try something new. They pooled their resources, knowledge and QA experience and struck out on their own. The beginnings of Xceptance are thus all about passion and commitment and the belief in making software better. Continue reading 10 Years of Xceptance – The Story→
Acceptance, huh? Be honest, you almost thought we were being serious about this whole name change! But, as convincing as it might have sounded, we’re not going to abandon our fancy company name, ever!
Despite the uncommon spelling we like our quirky label and the way it usually triggers follow-up questions. It is recognizable and fun and, once you got the hang of it, it sticks. We also trust in SEO and the sanity of our customers so that we don’t feel like there’s a reason to worry much about it. Of course there’ll always be the issue with auto-correction, but we think we can handle that. Having said this: Xceptance it is!
Just in time for our 10th anniversary, we are pleased to announce that the company is going to change its name from Xceptance to something more tangible and easier to pronounce: Acceptance.
With that, we are reacting to the release of a search engine list containing the different versions of the search term users entered to find Xceptance online. Terms reached from “Xcaptence” to “Ecceptance” and even “Axceptacne”. To us, this list was some kind of a wake-up call because we no longer want to take the risk of losing clients just because of a fancy company name. That’s why we decided to settle for this easier to google, user-friendly name because, after all, a company name should represent the company it stands for. An additional benefit of the new name: the auto-correction of mail and office software will never put a red mark on the company’s name again.
Within the coming week we’ll update the website and all other company-related content with the new name and logo. For our current clients and affiliates there won’t be any changes.
Sauce Labs and BrowserStack – What Are They and Why Use Them?
This approach still work fine, but we came up with a much better one. Head over to GitHub and see our Multi-Browser-TestSuite for XLT. It will make multi browser testing a breeze. By the way, all the code is licensed under the MIT license, so absolute flexibility for you.
Sauce Labs and BrowserStack allow you to run automated test cases on different browsers and operating systems. Both provide more than 200 mobile and desktop browsers on different operating systems. The benefit? You can focus on coding instead of having to maintain different devices. You can easily run your test cases written on iOS on an Internet Explorer without actually buying a Windows device; and last not least, you don’t need to worry about drivers or maintenance.
Xceptance has released version 4.3.2 of its load testing and test automation product Xceptance LoadTest. This is an improvement and bug fix release. More information about this release can be found in the release notes.
Script Developer
Improvement: Support for Firefox 27.
Improvement: Usability improvement when sorting test data entries or module parameters.
Improvement: Native platform line endings are used when exporting Java code now.
Improvement: Script migration errors are now written to the log panel instead of to messages boxes.
Fix: No error message anymore when two scripts have the same name but are located in different packages.
Result Browser
Fix: Query parameters were incorrectly parsed because the fragment (#…) was included.
Framework
Fix: WebDriver features were not exposed when WebDrivers were reused.
We continue to share cool things with the community of software testers and developers. Today we are announcing the availability of our no coding test suite for XLT under the Apache License v2.0.
Introduction
You want to fire just a couple of URLs to load test your application? You have to investigate the performance problems of a feature and you need accurate measurements as well as a lot of load generated? You like XLT and its capabilities, but you don’t have the time to compile a sophisticated test suite from scratch? Whatever your motivation, our new test suite for XLT is the solution you are looking for. Continue reading TestSuite-NoCoding – Load Testing with CSV Files→
Xceptance released version 4.3 of its load testing and test automation product Xceptance LoadTest. It features a wide range of improvements and new functionality.
As always, this update is free of charge for every user. You can use XLT freely for your daily automation work, regression testing, and performance validation. If you are an eligible Open Source project, you can get a full XLT license for your load and performance testing needs for free as well.
Script Developer
Enjoy more automation with less clicking. The new information panel summarizes the specifics of the currently selected item, so you do not need to open it anymore. Additionally, the new log panel lists all executed commands and their respective parameters.
XLT Script Developer
The new Information Panel
The new Log Panel
If an element is styled with the CSS property text-transform, then the element’s text on the screen may have different character casing from what is defined in the page’s DOM tree. The WebDriver specification mandates to return the text as shown on the screen. Script Developer will now record text with the the character casing that appears on the screen and it will also take the CSS property text-transform into account when replaying text assertions.
Reporting
The XLT load test reports have been improved by adding more charts and data details, such as overall statistics for all timers. Arrival rate charts have been added to visualize the load development over time and make sure the desired load factor was reached.
Charts can now optionally be configured to be logarithmic. A capping can be added to hide larger spikes, which usually make charts hard to read, without removing the important information altogether.
Standard Chart
Chart with Cap
Logarithmic Chart
The new networking section summarizes all general network-related statistics and charts on a separate page.
The error and event page has been redesigned and includes a new error chart that contains separate graphs for all transactions/actions/requests so that the temporal distribution of transaction/action/request errors is displayed in one chart. A new error summary table groups all errors by their error message to help you see which types of errors occurred and how many of them.
Load and Performance Testing
The master controller features two new commands to validate the availability of agents and display their current configuration. A new command line option permits the skipping of result downloads when XLT is used as a load generator only.
Framework Extensions
A set of new commands is available in Script Developer and in the framework: commands such as assertAttribute, assertStyle, assertClass, assertEval, and their matching store and wait equivalents.
XLT can now send and receive IDs as part of the request to ease the correlation of server-side logs and test results. XLT may send a randomly generated alphanumeric ID as request header or extract such an ID from an arbitrary response header.
When dealing with different test environments, different load profiles, and/or different test data at the same time, managing different combinations of configuration settings can be challenging. The new property file include feature makes it easier now to predefine aspects and reuse them later in different configurations without copying and pasting.
When a test case reads a certain setting from the configuration, the framework uses a fallback strategy when doing the property look-up. This strategy performs an additional look-up step now, based on the transaction name (the short name to which the full class name is mapped). This additional step lets you parameterize different transactions differently, even if they are mapped to the same class and therefore share the same code.
The webdriver that will be used when executing functional tests can now be configured via properties. This allows greater flexibility and hardcoding is not necessary anymore.
When XLT executes XML script test cases with a WebDriver instance that is capable of taking screenshots, it can take a screenshot after each action, if desired.
Result Browser
A new look matches the overall styling of reports. Also, the navigation bar can now be resized, requests are color coded to visualize the content type, and the first page is displayed automatically. URLs are now active links, so you can click them easily.
If needed, the content of a response can be beautified for certain content types (HTML, JavaScript, JSON, CSS). This includes formatting and syntax highlighting.
Misc
XLT is shipped with an empty test suite project that can be used as a template for your own projects.
HtmlUnit has been upgraded to version 2.12.
WebDriver/Selenium has been upgraded to version 2.39.0.
EC2 admin console permits setting a tag name now.
Amazon Machine Images
The Amazon Machine Images (AMI) listed below are available for public use. Using these images is free of charge, but require that you own an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. Please make sure that your EC2 security group permits communication on port tcp/8500. AMIs with Java 6 are no longer provided.
eu-west-1 : ami-ceae46b9
us-east-1 : ami-2510394c
us-west-1 : ami-e4ccfca1
us-west-2 : ami-9ebadeae
ap-southeast-2 : ami-617be45b
If you need XLT-AMIs in Tokyo, Singapore, or Sao Paulo, please let us know.
Purchase Licenses and Support Online
Licenses and support can be conveniently ordered through our XLT Self Service Center. You can instantly download licenses and purchase support right when it is needed. All your invoices and previous licenses (when purchased online) are accessible at any time.
We will notify you before your license or support runs out, so that you will never miss that again. This enables you to continue your daily automation and load testing work without interruption. Please note that we do not renew your contracts automatically, so no strings attached.
Visa and MasterCard are accepted. All credit card data is processed and secured by Wirecard.
If you care about web page speed, that is the information you have to memorize first.
The most important concept in pagespeed is the critical rendering path. This is true because understanding this concept can help you do a very wonderful thing… Make a large webpage with many resources load faster than a small webpage with few resources.
Since most webpages have many different components, it is not always possible to just remove everything to make a page load faster. If you have ever wondered “What else can I do to make my pages fast?” or “How does Google expect pages to load in one second?” then this concept is for you.
Software Testing is part of software development. So you need a form of revision control for your source aka test code, and documents. You also need it to be able to review code, compare the history of code… or maybe simply to help others to master it.
We recently started our migration from Subversion to Git. Not because we have been unsatisfied with SVN, mostly because we want to use what our customers use. Additionally we want to profit from the different functionality Git offers, such as local commits and cheap branching.
But Git is different and just changing the tool does not change anything, it might even turns things worse. Because you cannot run Git like SVN. Well, you can, but that still requires you to know the basics of Git to understand what it will do to your work and how a typical workflow looks like. The commands are different too.
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There certainly are things out there that money can’t buy, just like the Beatles once sang. However, you might agree with us that money can do good (things), if managed appropriately.
