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 …Read More »Recovering Corrupted LoadRunner Results
Mastering a tool like LoadRunner requires familiarity not only with its features and functions, but also its quirks and workarounds. For example, LoadRunner occasionally runs into a problem while a test scenario is running and any attempt to open the results file throws an error. We have identified recovery procedures …Read More »Agile: It’s Not Just for Software
It seems Agile software development practices are being applied to everything these days. There is even Agile Parenting! It reminds us of the object-oriented craze in the late 80s and a publication titled “My Cat is Object-Oriented”. So are we going too far, or is Agile good for more than …Read More »Vendor Independence: Theory and Practice
This topic comes up periodically, usually just before or after introducing a new major commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product into a solution. Forward-thinking managers or software architects become concerned about avoiding “vendor lock-in” that could result in higher license costs, increased dependence on obsolete products, or an expensive software migration in …Read More »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 …Read More »XForms – Lagging Implementations Point to Bigger Issue
XForms seem like such a good idea. With declarative binding of form fields directly to XML document elements, you can implement an XML-centric XFormx/REST/XQuery (XRX) architecture and avoid a bunch of complex server-side code: no Javabeans needed to map HTML form fields to Java objects, and no object-relational mappings to persist the data. Use some XSLT …Read More »XML Schema Design: Form Follows Function
A disagreement on a recent project got me thinking about some of the more subtle aspects of schema design. In this particular case, there were two different opinions on the best way to represent supertypes and subtypes. Since the schema was based on an abstract UML model, supertypes and subtypes …Read More »Is Oracle XML DB Ready for Prime Time?
Recent experience suggests not. At least not if you want to mix XML and relational data. Lately we’ve tried to generate XML records from about 10 relational tables using Oracle’s XQuery with the ora:view() function. That attempt failed with an indefinite hang when processing more than a few hundred records …Read More »Achieving High Availability with Oracle
Applications that require high availability need some form of redundancy to protect against failures. For those with an Oracle database, the first thing that comes to mind is often Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). But is this the best solution? Oracle RAC allows multiple active DMBS servers to access a …Read More »