Testing Center of Excellence

Many organizations use a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) to establish standard processes and procedures, promote best practices, and use common tools to provide high-quality testing services at low cost.  I recently had a chance to think about the use of a TCoE in a US federal agency.  Specifically, defining an operating model for a TCoE that allows it to evolve over time and support an agency’s emerging testing needs.  Here are some thoughts.

First, use a Governance board comprised of stakeholders who represent the customers of the TCoE.  The board preserves and strengthens stakeholder confidence in the TCoE via two complementary routes. One, it educates the TCoE about the needs of the customers.  For example, it may ask the TCoE vendor to staff test engagements with testers who have prior knowledge of a particular domain.  Two, it champions the use of the TCoE within their organization.  This is particularly important when there is resistance to the use of TCoE within the agency.

Second, use a small Governance team focused on the long-term governance tasks distinct from the Execution team focused on the day-to-day testing tasks.  As shown in the graphic, creating two distinct teams allows proper focus in several important areas:

  1. The Governance team takes the lead to “collaborate & establish” standard processes and procedures, best practices, and common tools for the TCoE and makes them available in a centralized repository.  The collaboration is primarily between the two teams and the stakeholders.  If the idea of a TCoE within an agency is new, consider integrating change management principles to ease the transition.
  2. The Execution team “learns and adopts” the artifacts produced in the previous step with active guidance from the Governance team to ensure they know how to tailor them to the specific needs of their customers.
  3. The Execution team “implements and reports” the typical life cycle activities in a test engagement such as plan, prepare, execute, report, and closeout using the outputs produced in step 1 and learned and adopted in step 2.
  4. And finally, the Governance team “measures and improves” TCoE artifacts using results from the TCoE test engagements.  Without this step, the critical feedback loop never occurs leading to ossified practices that don’t address the emerging needs of the agency.

In practice, the Governance team, if any, is usually tasked with producing test templates or managing the document repository which does not add much value to the TCoE. Similarly, testers rarely objectively evaluate their own practices as they are busy testing.  At one of the agencies, we actively sought feedback from our customers about the test engagements, used a Kanban board for common understanding of everyone’s test engagements, held regular briefings to ensure best practices spread quickly within the team, continually evaluated new tools to support emerging needs, and used a “QA of QA” model to evaluate work products produced by our own testing team to ensure standard processes and procedures were followed.  All this without using a separate Governance team.

However, use of a well-planned operating model can help a TCoE overcome some of these challenges in a much more systematic way.  And one more thing: how large a Governance team should be is dependent on many factors, but I think spending up to 5% of the TCoE budget on Governance is a reasonable start.

Hopefully, this post gives you an idea or two to help you with your own TCoE.  Feel free to leave any comments or questions or write to me directly at anish.sharma at bpsconsulting.com.

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LoadRunner and Use of WinInet Option

By default, LoadRunner uses its own sockets implementation, which is very robust and allows use of hundreds of virtual users per load generator during a test.  However, under certain conditions the sockets implementation does not seem to work. Or so it seems.

During one of our client engagements, recording of a script using Web (HTTP/HTML) protocol proceeded smoothly.  However, its replay failed.  The target URL failing was using https protocol.  The error recorded in Vugen was step-download timeout exceeded which was set to the default of 120 secs.  This is a common error that typically means something went wrong and the server did not return a response to the client’s request within the timeout value.  The URL in question simply fetched a WSDL.  All major browsers (IE, Firefox and Chrome) on that machine were able to successfully retrieve the WSDL without any issues.  Turning on Advanced trace and Print SSL options in VuGen did not provide any clues.  It seemed like LR was making the request but nothing much was being returned from the server.

Turning on the WinInet option in run-time settings of VuGen immediately made the output window of VuGen a beehive of activity. The server responded immediately.  This option essentially allows LoadRunner to use Internet Explorer’s HTTP implementation under the covers.  Using this option, everything that IE can do is made available to LoadRunner.  Unfortunately, the use of WinInet option comes with a penalty.  According to LoadRunner documentation (v.11.51), this option is not as scalable as the default sockets implementation.  HP product support indicated that if using WinInet option allows script replay then that is our only option.  Luckily, we found a workaround by staying patient and using Wireshark to look under the covers.  Incidentally, Wireshark is a fantastic tool to add to your performance testing arsenal if you haven’t already.

Making a recording of the traffic in Wireshark while the URL was accessed in Internet Explorer and comparing it to a recording made while the LoadRunner script was replayed in VuGen showed a problem during SSL handshake.  The difference was immediately apparent just watching the traffic in Wireshark (best to use a display filter if your network is as chatty as our customer’s).  IE was using TLSv1 protocol in order to make the request to the server while LoadRunner was trying SSLv1 and SSLv2 protocols, which although dated are still popular.  It is not clear if the server itself was configured to respond only to TLSv1.  But LoadRunner NEVER tried to use TLSv1 during handshake with the server.   A quick read of VuGen’s documentation clarified that LoadRunner uses only SSLv1 and SSLv2 by default.  By using web_set_sockets_option(“SSL_VERSION”,”TLS”) function and AND turning off the WinInet option allowed replay to work without a hitch.  As a result we now have a scalable scenario to test our web application.

Incidentally, you can also verify which version of SSL is being used for client-server communication by using the openssl binaries that ship with LoadRunner.  For example, to verify which version of SSL is used to connect to google.com, try the following:
  • Navigate to the folder containing openssl.exe (typically <LoadRunner installation folder>/bin on Windows).
  • Enter openssl s_client -connect google.com:443 
For your environment, replace google.com with your server name and 443 with the port number on which https traffic is handled.
You will see something like the following output (only the relevant lines are shown)
SSL handshake has read 1752 bytes and written 316 bytes
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is RC4-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1
    Cipher    : RC4-SHA
    Session-ID: F02931AD5F99B4FE65B52A8ACAEFB8378E6C4B0F89A0A71BC28A030236B3F8AA
    Session-ID-ctx: 
    Master-Key: E1A9015993DD7D7EBDE13313AAA0DB768EA6644944FAE7F4AFE6B730061D4E0FB9F5A511616ACCBF073BCBDF90505FF2
    Key-Arg   : None
    Start Time: 1360550907
    Timeout   : 300 (sec)
    Verify return code: 0 (ok)
The highlighted text shows the protocol in use between the client and the server.
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