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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.
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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.
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Inaugural XLT Summit in Jena

On January 19-20, 2015, Xceptance held its first XLT Summit. About thirty representatives of well-known companies from a variety of fields, including finance, retail and eCommerce, all of whom use XLT to help them in developing web-based software applications, accepted our invitation to meet at Xceptance’s headquarters in Jena, Germany. The goal of the conference was to give XLT users the opportunity to discuss their experiences using our tool both with each other and with the internal XLT development team.

To kick things off, on January 19 we enjoyed a casual dinner in a local restaurant. The next day there was a varied program consisting of presentations contributed both by Xceptance colleagues and external users. Our customers reported on their practical experience using XLT, and had a chance to discuss their results with the other users. The many different applications of XLT–from load testing to test automation to application monitoring–were thus illustrated in light of actual day-to-day practice. A selection of these presentations can be found here: http://goo.gl/fPJj1Q, and parts of the presentation provided by our guests from OTTO.DE can be read here: http://dev.otto.de/.

In addition, the XLT development team presented the newest XLT features. Our guests had the opportunity to speak directly with the developers about their specific feature requests, some of which we were able to immediately agree to implement.

In short, the conference was a great success. In response to the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the participants, the XLT Summit will now be a regular annual event.

Last but not least, we would like to thank all the attendees, without whose engagement, interest and suggestions the event would not have been possible!

Should Load Tests Validate Functionality?

My answer to this question is a very strong “yes“. You might want to limit yourself a little in the overall validation, but checking response codes only is a strong fail in my opinion. Additionally, just checking the result by checking a single phrase or word is not enough.

Reasons and Examples

  • Modern web implementations often incorrectly return application status pages with response code 200.
  • How do you ensure that you got the entire page back and not only the first 75%?
  • Imagine an e-commerce search that breaks under load and instead of saying “I found 200 matches”, it returns a page saying “no matches found, did you mean …”. The latter is still a valid page but your load test will not discover the flaw.
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It is just HTTPS now

The Blog is HTTPS onlyThe recent events of security problems with WordPress motivated us to speed up the effort to move our blog into the HTTPS only mode. This does not fix WordPress security problems, but makes it easier to spot possible problems later and might protect us against the negative outcome from time to time.

So we set the Strict-Transport-Security header to tell the browser that HTTP is off-limits for this site once and for all. We also turned all links to our blog from our website and internally in the blog including resources into HTTPS links.

Also we set .htaccess redirect rules to force all users to use HTTPS and only hit the domain that has the proper certificate.

The only thing open is to get our hoster convinced to properly support TLS 1.2.

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!

We’ve Adopted the Word “Testen”!

WortpatenschaftThere 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).

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10 Years of Xceptance – The Story

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.
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SQE training week in Boston

SQE Training TableAt Xceptance we think that “you live and you learn”, so we were eager to read about an upcoming training week by SQE in Boston (March 24-28). The various tracks had promising headlines like ‘How to Break Software: Robustness Testing Unleashed’ or “Testing Under Pressure” but we decided to pick our favorites and chose “Exploring Usability Testing” and “Mobile Application Testing”.

The usability training was scheduled for just one day, the mobile training for two. We knew that it would be tricky to fit an overview of usability testing in just one day of training, and it turned out the instructor was well aware of these concerns.
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