The performance of your application affects your business more than you might think. Top engineering organizations think of performance not as a nice-to-have, but as a crucial feature of their product. Those organizations understand that performance has a direct impact on user experience and, ultimately, their bottom line. Unfortunately, most engineering teams do not regularly test the performance and scalability of their infrastructure.
The Exploratory Testing Chrome Extension is a free and open source extension for the Chrome browser that is designed to make exploratory testing of web sites easier. This extension will allow you to take notes during your exploratory testing sessions with a nice set of additional features.
QualiTest has recently produced a report and an infographic about the typology and sources of the most common bugs found in web sites. The company has used for this the bug summaries from hundreds of web site testing projects performed recently.
WebPagetest is an awesome tool, but out of the box there isn’t an easy way to run large numbers of tests and get performance trends over time. This video presents wpt-script, an open source tool that makes this process much easier. wpt-script is the short name for WebPagetest Script, a simple wrapper for the WebPagetest API that allows you to easily generate tests and graph results.
CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting and testing utility written in Javascript for the PhantomJS WebKit headless browser and SlimerJS (Gecko). It eases the process of defining a full navigation scenario and provides useful high-level functions, methods and syntactic sugar for doing common tasks. PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.
Intern is an open source software testing tool for Javascript. It runs tests using the browser or node.js and seamlessly integrates with SauceLabs or Selenium. You can write tests using object, TDD, or BDD styles and get full code coverage reporting with Istanbul. This article by Alvin Liu, Todd Kaplinger and Mingzhe Huang provides a presentation of Intern and explains how to use it to test web applications.
This article from Alan Bowers and James Bell provides an introduction to setting up a software testing infrastructure using Selenium WebDriver and Cucumber. It shows how to create a test suite for single-page web applications and to run tests across multiple web and mobile browsers via Selenium Grid.
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