Load Testing Blog
Support added for cloud engines in 5 more Amazon AWS EC2 regions
Load Tester now has support for the 4 newest AWS regions: Ohio, Sao Paulo, Frankfurt, Seoul and Mumbai.
Starting with the 6.6.14774 release, you will now be able to generate load from these regions using our built-in cloud engine support. You’ll need an AWS account, of course.
Unfortunately, not all of the new regions support the instance sizes that Load Tester supports:
Mumbai is missing m3.medium and c3.large
Sao Paulo is missing m3.medium and c3.large
Ohio is missing m3.medium and t2.micro
Unfortunately, m3.medium is the size used by default in Load Tester, when starting cloud engines manually or automatically. So some care is required when using … Continue reading »
Upgrading repositories from 6.5 to 6.6
I’m more than a little proud that we have been able to keep our repository format backwards-compatible for the entire life of the product, with only a few minor bumps along the road. Unfortunately, that streak has come to an end. Thanks an oversight on my part in reviewing the compatibility of a 3rd-party library, some 6.5 repositories cannot be upgraded to 6.6 without some effort on your part.
TLDR: If you don’t use real-browser testcases, you get a pass – just upgrade as usual. Otherwise, before installing 6.6, open your repositories in 6.5 and delete all replays and load test … Continue reading »
Instant Load Engines Retired
Beginning with the 6.6 release, we will no longer be producing our Instant Load Engines ISOs.
Better customer service with a better ticket system
As part of our continuous efforts to improve our technical support and services, we are moving to a new system for technical support. Our new tech support system is easier for you to use and easier for us to achieve the excellence we strive for. Starting immediately, new support requests submitted via our Load Tester software will be directed into the new system.
The new system features:
Better support through email: if you prefer email correspondence, you can reply to tickets via email and include attachments
Better teamwork: you can CC a coworker to give them access to the ticket so they … Continue reading »
Web Performance Tester 6.5 release
If you’ve been following the quick pace of development of our real-browser features, we know you’ll be excited about these new features:
Extract values
Data in the browser can now be extracted into a user state variable for use later in the testcase. Read more…
Organize testcase steps
The steps in real-browser testcases can now be organized into hierarchical groups for better readability and easier maintenance. Read more…
Improved selection from choice boxes
Drop-down choices now support selection by position in the list (i.e. index) and by the option value (a hidden attribute in the HTML). Continue reading »
Selecting a choice by index or value from a drop-down list in the browser
The first release of Web Performance Tester (WPT) with real browser support allow users to select items from a drop-down list (an HTML Select element) based on the text visible to a human user – just like a real user would do. There are times, however, when choosing based on the position in the list (index) or the hidden value of the selection makes a testcase more robust. This is especially true when the text descriptions of the choices may change due to variations in language, software changes, etc.
Starting with version 6.5, real-browser testcases can be configured to select by … Continue reading »
Extracting Values from the Browser
Occasionally, a testcase requires a bit of information from one page in the testcase to be used on another page, later in the testcase. In some cases, this is exactly what a real user would do (e.g. click on a link chosen based on text that appeared earlier). Other times, it is a hidden identifier that is used to choose the right element from a list later. Either way, an Extract a value step can be used to get data from the browser.
In the above example, an attribute value is extracted and stored in a user state variable named … Continue reading »
Organize Steps into Logical Groups in Real Browser testcases
With Web Performance Tester 6.5 (WPT), you can easily organize the steps in your testcases into groups to make them easier to read and maintain. You can create groups within groups with no limit on the depth. This example shows three groups – the 3rd (Type the post) is contained in the 2nd (Create post and submit). The fourth group, not shown here, includes all the steps in the testcase (i.e. the entire testcase is a group).
Increased productivity and editing on-the-fly
Create groups just like any other step – add a step and change the type to Group. Quickly create your … Continue reading »
Accessing downloaded files in real-browser testcases
Dealing with file downloads is considered by many to be problematic when developing testcases with Selenium/WebDriver. Web Performance Tester (WPT) makes this task relatively effortless when working with Chrome – when the virtual user will initiates a download (by clicking something), the file will be downloaded into a directory that exists only for the duration of that testcase. This solves one problem – running out of disk space due to files downloaded during test iterations – because when the testcase ends, the temporary folder is removed along with the downloaded files.
Some tests require validating the content of the file, so … Continue reading »
Create verify steps on-the-fly during real-browser recording in 6.4 release
Verifying elements and text on the page is an important part of every testcase. Web Performance Tester makes this easy by adding verify steps directly from the browser while recording the testcase. The Verify option in the browsers pop-up menu provides a list of the most common verifications:
In addition to verifying the page title and URL, there are three categories of verifications supported:
For any element, you can verify:
text of the element
element exists
element is visible
element is clickable
For any field (text input, button, checkbox, etc) you can verify:
field value
field is (or not) selected
By selecting text on the page, you can verify … Continue reading »