Category Archives: Software

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!

Release of XLT 4.8

XLT 4.8 is primarily a technology update release, but also comes with some new features.

First and foremost, XLT now ships with Selenium 3, the new version of the WebDriver library. All other core libraries have been updated as well. This also includes HtmlUnit for an improved browser emulation. Beginning with this release, XLT requires Java 8 to run.

The XLT framework also comes with some functional improvements. XLT now supports OperaDriver out of the box and can run FirefoxDriver in either the new Marionette mode using geckodriver or in the “old” legacy mode. When you drive Firefox via XltFirefoxDriver, you will get a much more detailed result browser now, with almost the same request and response details that you already know from XltDriver. Any values that you programmatically add to the newly introduced value log of a session are shown in the result browser as well. Furthermore, most of the XLT framework properties can now be configured not only globally, but also specifically for a certain test scenario.

For load testers, there is something in the box as well. If you use the AWS EC2 cloud a lot, you will be glad to hear that the new AWS data center in Ohio is now fully supported. The load test report has been tuned to become usable much faster, even with lengthy pages such as the Requests page.

Last but not least, the Poster Store demo application and the XLT Jenkins Plug-In have both been updated. If you ever wanted to load-test your WebDAV server, there is now a new demo test suite for that.

Sounds interesting? More details can be found in the release notes of XLT 4.8.

Xceptance released XLT 4.5

Xceptance released version 4.5 of its load testing and test automation product Xceptance LoadTest (XLT). This release enables you to write better test documentation, delivers more scripting capabilities, and shows really cool charts.

XLT 4.5.1 ScriptdocScript Developer has been enhanced to let you maintain the documentation of your script library directly in Script Developer. This way you can create and maintain your test documentation together with the code and don’t need to be able to read the code to understand the test cases.

Load testing is even more fun now. Continue reading Xceptance released XLT 4.5

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

Our New Website is Live!

New Xceptance WebsiteWe proudly announce that Xceptance has a new website. Our 10th anniversary made us look back on where we are coming from, what we have been doing and what experiences we gained throughout the past ten years. It was time to have a new web presence reflect all that!

We took advantage of Bootstrap, Less, Jekyll, Git, Font Awesome, and Jenkins to create a website that primarily wants to help our visitors quickly learn about Xceptance, our services and our product. We wanted it to be modern but plain so that we can communicate what we do in the most comprehensive and user-friendly way possible. No boasting, no bragging, and just a little bit about ourselves. To have it all look nice and work smoothly for the mobile users as well, we used Bootstrap.

Since we’re always looking for new people that want to join us, we added a comprehensive jobs page which lists current open positions in both our offices, Cambridge, MA, USA and Jena, Germany.

Go check it out for yourselves! As always, we appreciate any kind of feedback!

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

Terms explained: Visits, Page views, Sessions, Requests, Hits

Terms explained: Visits, Page views, Sessions, Requests, Hits
Image © Juja Schneider

When discussing possible load test setups with our clients, we usually need to refer to these key terms: visits, sessions, requests, hits, page impressions, and page views. Actually, we don’t need to discuss all of them, but some are occasionally brought up by the customer, some are requested by us, depending on the context (and complex enough to be discussed in a separate article).
Continue reading Terms explained: Visits, Page views, Sessions, Requests, Hits

Blog Performance – We Kicked it up a Notch

Usually, we just  measure the performance of our customer’s applications and talk about it, but from time to time we have to set an example ourselves.

In the last couple of weeks, we increasingly felt that our blog isn’t loading fast enough to deliver a satisfying experience. You know that when you can feel it, it might be too late already. Additionally, SEO is about content and performance and our blog is an important marketing tool for us.

That’s why we went on a quest for improving the performance of our company’s WordPress-based blog. Our motto: “Don’t just complain about the lack of performance, do something about it!”

Step 0 – Measuring

Our initial blog performanceMeasuring is believing and so we started with this WebPageTest result. As you can see, the initial performance is bad, a lot of content is not properly cached, and rendering started after 2.6 sec. Time for some serious tuning.

Step 1 – Reading

Tuning requires you to know what to tune. Thus, we read the famous Best Practises for Speeding Up Your Web Site by Yahoo. A similar article by Google can be found here. If you deal with web site performance in any way, you should read this. We consider it mandatory for performance and web testers.

Continue reading Blog Performance – We Kicked it up a Notch

Our Top 6 Software Testing Trends 2013

Happy New Year to everybody! Time to think about 2013 and the work ahead of us.

The ecommerce market is growing and becoming more competitive every day. This means, the customer experience is going to play an even bigger role in 2013. Online shops are expected to be stylish and beautifully designed – but customers are getting more demanding in terms of performance and usability on multiple devices.

The following topics are our point of view on the most important issue that will keep us busy in 2013.
Continue reading Our Top 6 Software Testing Trends 2013