Category Archives: Open Source

Xceptance LoadTest Goes Open Source

We have often been asked why XLT (Xceptance LoadTest) is free but not open source. Now, after considering our customers’ business needs and the advantages of using open source as opposed to free software, Xceptance has decided to open source XLT under the Apache License 2.0.

Within the next 30 days, we will restructure the XLT code base and move subprojects into independent open repositories. We will continue to expand and improve the documentation. All code will be published on GitHub.

Xceptance will continue to maintain and extend XLT as before. Releases will be built and published by Xceptance on a regular schedule. Libraries will be published to Maven Central as part of the open-sourcing process. The latest releases will be available from the XLT GitHub repository as well. Of course, the GitHub defect tracker will start to be your source for feature development and defect fixes.

If you are interested in training, projects, or support for XLT and load testing in general, we of course also offer those services, and will expand this offering further in upcoming months.

By open sourcing, we are opening a new chapter for XLT and we invite everyone to join us. More to come!

Thuringia’s Open-Source Prize for XLT

Wolfgang Tiefensee, Thuringia’s Secretary of Commerce, in conjunction with the board of directors of the IT industry network ITNet Thuringia, awarded the first Thueringen Open-Source Prize to three companies, all of them software companies based in Jena: TRITUM, Xceptance and GraphDefined.

Open Source Prize Title Picture Second Place

It is an honor for Xceptance to be the second-place winner of this competition. This result clearly demonstrates that open source as a component of commercial products can be a clear competitive advantage. XLT incorporates a number of open-source projects, including Apache HttpClient, Jetty, HtmlUnit, JUnit, and the Apache Commons libraries. As part of developing XLT, Xceptance is involved in testing and providing feedback for these projects, thus giving back to the open-source community.

While XLT is itself not open source, Xceptance does provide the software free of charge and with virtually no usage restrictions, so for most applications there is no noticeable difference to open-source software.

Neodymium – An Open Source Framework for Web Testing

TL;DR: Neodymium is a Java-based test library for web automation that utilizes existing libraries (Selenide, WebDriver, Allure, JUnit, Maven) and concepts (localization, test multiplication, page objects) and adds missing components such as test data handling, starter templates, multi-device handling, and other small but useful everyday helpers.

Motivation

As a company focused on quality assurance and testing, Xceptance always needs test automation software, especially end-to-end automation software. Several years ago we built a Firefox add-on that was designed to create and run browser automation. The tool was primarily used by people who didn’t necessarily have a strong background in software development. Today, the landscape is a bit different: Mozilla cut the cord on the APIs we were using and standard programming languages have largely taken over test automation because they are more flexible and less proprietary. These changes convinced us it was time to implement an idea we had already hatched, namely our own Open Source test automation project: Neodymium. It is written in and utilizes the Java platform, it is MIT licensed, and of course you will find it on GitHub: https://github.com/Xceptance/neodymium-library

Basis

There are many libraries out there to aid web automation in Java, so developers are faced with the task of choosing ones they like and somehow making them work together. On top of that, there are tasks that require some custom code to work properly. We identified the overall tooling problem mostly as a hurdle in getting started and setting up a project. Finally, there are always things missing such as test data handling, concurrency, and common patterns which you don’t want to have to develop yourself. We chose JUnit, Selenide, WebDriver, Maven, and Allure for the base tooling.

Selenide provides an easy-to-use API to control Selenium WebDriver. Allure offers good mechanics to generate useful reports based on the assertions and actions you perform throughout your test cases. Maven is used to set up the build and execution environment for our framework and all the test projects. We decided to use JUnit as the test runner since it is the de facto standard in the Java world, but we enhanced the capabilities of JUnit to do even more. At its heart, Neodymium is a JUnit runner that wraps default JUnit behavior and adds significant useful functionality to it.

Multiple Browsers

You want to be able to run the same tests for different resolutions and/or browsers to simulate the browsers most common among your users. Additionally, you need to be able to implement small differences within your test execution to address variants such as responsive designs or progressive web apps. So we added a way to run web browsers with different configurations and retrieve the current device type and resolution from within the test.

Neodymium provides a Java annotation that can be added to your test case, in order to run different browser setups. Neodymium is very flexible in configuring browsers, allowing you to fully leverage the Chrome device emulation offerings.

Test Data

Another common task is the execution of a test case with different data sets, such as testing address forms with all the relevant variations. The basic idea is to have test data and data sets in structured files next to your code, preferably as JSON, XML, property style, or simply CSV. Hence, we introduced an easy-to-use API to access the current data set and retrieve basic types from it. Furthermore, you can configure specific scenarios running only a subset or even no data set at all by adding proper annotations. To complete the picture, Neodymium supports test data on a global and package-level scope.

Localization

Another recurring topic in modern software projects is localization. Most of the web sites that are in need of test automation also support several locales. We decided to provide an out-of-the-box solution.

Neodymium’s localization feature makes use of a central translation file written in YAML format. YAML helps to structure the translations. Additionally, we implemented a simple way to override specific translations for different locales. The localized text can be easily retrieved using Neodymium API methods that are globally available.

Development Support

As it is essential to understand what your test is doing, we added a feature that enables you to slow down the test execution and highlight elements that match the current selector. Since you can chain selectors using Selenide, any chain of elements is also represented by the highlighting. With this feature activated, a developer can track down the cause of test failures much more easily. In addition, we provide information on how to set up logging in your project should you need that. Finally, we decided to use the Page Object pattern to organize the website-related code to reduce the maintenance effort and increase reusability.   

Reporting

Allure is a widely used framework to generate reports. When using Neodymium with Selenide, your automation code also contributes report information. Your test classes and methods are listed as well as detailed Selenide automation commands. In case of errors, additional details such as screenshots and source code of the page in question are available. Neodymium also provides means to structure code blocks for reporting purposes.

Continuous Integration

Implementing principles of continuous integration will deliver more reliable software by increasing efficiency, and automation is nothing without a continuous integration environment.  Yet in almost every development cycle you will eventually end up needing varied settings due to differences in your setup, which can get complicated. Neodymium provides support for extra configuration files during development to override the standard production settings as needed. Furthermore, the framework supports overriding properties that change the configuration of your test execution by setting environment variables or simply passing Java arguments.

Because automation is supposed to run quickly, Neodymium provides support for parallel test execution and also demonstrates that setup as part of the sample test suite.

Documentation and Templates

Does Neodymium address some of your test automation challenges? Does it sound like a good entry point for your test automation?

Neodymium is hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/Xceptance/neodymium-library), where the accompanying project wiki (https://github.com/Xceptance/neodymium-library/wiki) provides extensive documentation to help you get started and answer your questions.

You might also want to take a look at the comprehensive example projects using Neodymium with Cucumber (https://github.com/Xceptance/neodymium-cucumber-example) or plain Java (https://github.com/Xceptance/neodymium-example). We’ve even provided a template project (https://github.com/Xceptance/neodymium-template) to get you started automating in no time.

License

Neodymium is licensed under the MIT License.

Who Are We

We are Xceptance. A software testing company with strong commerce knowledge and projects with customers from all around the world. Besides Neodymium, we have developed Xceptance Load Test (XLT), a load and performance test tool that is available free of charge and features an extensive range of awesome features to make the tester’s and developer’s life easier.

If you are looking for test automation that also covers the performance side of life, take a look at XLT. You can write and run load tests with real browsers including access to data from the Web Performance Timing API. In case browsers are too heavy, XLT has other modes of load testing to offer as well.

We offer professional support for Neodymium as well as implementation and training services.

Our Demandware SiteGenesis Community Test Suite

The community test suite homepageToday, we are happy to announce the release of our new Demandware SiteGenesis Community Test Suite! It is a test suite for automated storefront testing of the Demandware SiteGenesis reference e-commerce storefront.

The test suite’s intention is to share experiences, transfer knowledge, and to demonstrate best practices in test automation. The test suite is built using XLT of course. XLT is freely available and extends concepts you already know from Selenium.
Continue reading Our Demandware SiteGenesis Community Test Suite

We Take Web Privacy Seriously

Internet SurveillanceWhile privacy laws are still a work in progress, the EU and Germany have made several statements about what is right or wrong. But the current state of regulation is unclear about what actually is permitted or has to be provided.

Update

In the light of the EU GDPR (DSGVO in German) that kicks in on 25 May 2018, this article is even more important, because you can ensure that tracking will only happen when a user has not opted out or he/she consent to tracking. Also our method automatically honors DNT settings by the user and won’t bother any visitor if this settings has been applied. And now… please read on…

Xceptance takes the privacy of our users seriously. We decided to implement tracking and privacy for our website xceptance.com differently than what is usually seen on the market: we provide users with more choices, and we’re stricter about respecting your decisions, yet without pestering you with lots of button clicking.
Continue reading We Take Web Privacy Seriously

Xceptance.com Goes Open Source

GitHubLike most companies we use and benefit from open source projects from all around the world. To actively participate and give something back, we started our own open source project that others can hopefully benefit from as well: Our website Xceptance.com has been open sourced.

In building our new website, we faced different requirements and challenges, like easy to maintain pages, mostly static content, a modern design, multiple languages, multiple domains, and so on.
Continue reading Xceptance.com Goes Open Source

TestSuite-NoCoding – Load Testing with CSV Files

Our test suite on GitHubWe 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

Tutorial: Git – The Incomplete Introduction

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.

So we created this tutorial to get used to Git, understand, and learn it.
Continue reading Tutorial: Git – The Incomplete Introduction

XCMailr – An Open Source Test Mail Forwarder

As a software tester, an episode such as the one below must be more than familiar to you and, let’s be honest, it has the potential of making the top ten of the most annoying things in our daily work routine:

  • Pain in the neck: “Hey, I need more email addresses for testing, I just burnt all my own.”
  • You: “Well, just use a fake one.”
  • P: “Nah, I can’t, I need the activation emails.”
  • Y: “Well, then, there are good disposable mailers out there.”
  • P: “Very clever, but they aren’t protected by authentication and I signed an NDA for that project.”
  • Y: “Here, use this one.”
  • P: “But it wants to have a real email to sign me up and I don’t really feel like giving my real email away.”
  • Y: “$§5$!51z1hhsks!”

Granted, it’s a matter of course that committed testers have many email addresses but what’s the use of them when you’re always limited to a certain number, when you can’t quickly change them, or deactivate them when an email service got hold of them?
Continue reading XCMailr – An Open Source Test Mail Forwarder

Nice Reading: GitHub’s CSS Performance

GitHub CSS Performance, Title Slide

Another must read for the performance-aware programmer and tester. A nice slide deck about CSS performance issues at GitHub. Includes solutions as well.

A talk on some problems solved related to CSS Performance at GitHub. The talk was given at CSS Dev Conference in Honolulu, HI 2012. I recorded the presentation from my laptop and posted it here https://vimeo.com/54990931

Enjoy and keep in mind that performance matters.