Battelle recounts the early development of PageRank -- the inbound link count for a page as a metric of "importance" within the community -- and the subsequent improvements in search results that Google achieved and which has led to Google's success. But perhaps more importantly, he details the thread of ideas and events that led to the "pay per click (PPC)" innovation in the advertising business. PPC accounts for the enormous cash flow into Google and other search engine companies, and can be viewed as a main salvation for the Internet during the post-dot-COM crash of the early 2000s.

The picture, while certainly rosy, is not without flaws. There is a major problem with "gaming the search engines", and Battelle's treatment of the some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) scams is mercyless. Even worse, the general problem of click fraud -- how to weed out [and not be billed for] click-throughs to your site that arise from third parties or competitors -- gets a deservedly scathing attack.

You can read about these and other issues affecting the search industry in John Battelle's Blog, where you'll find a lot of current (December 2005) discussion about the click-fraud issue.

One subject missing in Batelle's book is the issue of validation of search results: how do you determine that a search engine's results really are as unbiased ("objective") as the search engine claims? [Hint: This might be a subject of a later post here!]

As is often the case, the ICSE conference also gives rise to a number of smaller, more-highly-focused "sub-conferences." For workers in software testing and web quality testing the Workshop on Automation of Software Test should be of particular interest. The workshop is co-chaired by Prof. Hong Zhu (Oxford University), Dr. Joseph Horgan (Telcordia, New Jersey), and Prof. S. C. Cheung (Hong Kong University).

The goal of the project was to provide detailed timing of how long a multi-tier server required to deliver pages to an end user in several phases: the initial page header ("above the fold"), the first full screen, and the final part of the first page ("below the fold"). The data collected in this project was used in load balancing and server tuning. Here is a catalog of recent eValid Success Stories.

But a little girl named Virginia O'Hanlon, back in December 1897, found a way to resolve her doubts about Santa Claus -- doubts sown because her friends had questioned Santa Claus' existence. She asked her father, "Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?" He in turn suggested that she write a local newspaper and ask the Editor for the truth on the matter. So she wrote to the New York Sun.

"Dear Virginia," replied Editor Francis P. Church, "...Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!... He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist... and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to live to make glad the heart of childhood."

Here is the full text of Virginia's Letter and Editor Church's response. -- Merry Christmas!

ISSTA's prior version were in 2004, 2002, 2000, 1998, etc. This workshop series grew from the original December 1978 Florida Workshop on Software Testing and Test Documentation, organized by Edward F. Miller, and the subsequent Workshop on Effectives of Testing and Proving Methods, held in Avalon, California, in May 1982, organized by Susan L. Gerhart.

This is not a symposium intended for the weak of mind or slow of technology, but instead is meant as a gathering place for top researchers in software testing and validation. Even if you don't attend, you can count on ISSTA for some of the latest and best work in the entire Software Quality field.

A transaction monitor is an eValid script that simulates an e-business transaction. Because eValid is a complete browser, these transactions preserve complete context and appear to the server as an actual user.

We run eValid scripts on a regular basis in this services to provide e-business customers with assurance about the actual, "last mile" durability and integrity of their web enabled applications. Here are some Example Monitoring Activities that illustrate how this type of monitoring works and the kinds of results it can give you.

The workshop series, usually held in conjunction with another conference, seems to step midway between pure-academic research efforts and pure-industrial activities. This mix is a reflection of the organizers, a strong mix of technologists from a variety of contexts and points of view.

Besides having fairly-practical topics the workshops generally publish the complete presentations over the web, and important feature for the archival value of the work. It's a concept worth emulating.

Not true, Boris says! He reports that all of his books are available -- but not necessarily from the original publisher. Here's the rundown on availability:

• Black Box Testing is available from J. Wiley and Sons.
• Software Testing Techniques available direct (see below).
• Software System Testing and Quality Assurance available direct (see below).
• Software Quality Reflections available direct (see below).

The price direct is $45 per book, which includes surface mail rate (cheapest rate) for delivery within the USA. For delivery elsewhere postage is added at the actual cost, without markup, as per the shipping method selected by the buyer. Contact Boris at:

Boris Beizer Ph. D.
1232 Glenbrook Road
Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006
bsquare@earthlink.net

As a brilliant autodidact himself, he is particularly well qualified to address questions about the effectiveness of "tester certification," in which certifying organizations train and certify people as having minimum testing skills.

We think his arguments in favor of merit contrast very well with the claims to fame of the various tester certification programs. Take a look at his Against Certification article and you'll see why James is so much in demand at agile development, software quality, and software testing conferences!

In this project we used eValid's ability to synchronize on a patch of a window to time how long an FTP download took. The timings, accurate to 1.0 msec, allowed the customer to optimize the delivery chain so customers world wide could get their gaming product quickly and reliably.

The 4th International Conference on Trust Management (iTrust'2006), to be held on 16-19 May 2006 in Pisa, Italy, looks at trust from multidisciplinary perspectives: economic, legal, psychology, philosophy, sociology, as well as information technology.

Building upon the work of the IST iTrust Working Group and the success of the three previous iTrust International conferences, the aims of iTrust'2006 are to attract a critical mass of experts from industry, government, and academia with a keen interest in the area of trust management. The goals are:

• To facilitate the cross-disciplinary investigation of fundamental issues underpinning computational trust models by bringing together expertise from technology oriented sciences, law, philosophy and social sciences.
• To facilitate the emergence of widely acceptable trust management processes for dynamic open systems and applications.
• To facilitate the development of new paradigms in the area of dynamic open systems which effectively utilize computational trust models.
• To facilitate the integration of new trust management paradigms and emerging architectures for Grid computing and Virtual Organizations.
• To help the incorporation of trust management elements into existing standards.

General Chairs of the conference are Fabio Martinelli, IIT-CNR, Italy and Fabio Massacci, University of Trento, Italy.

At the moment, the board consists of volunteers. All either already have experience on the Testing Board of another country, are specialists in the field of testing, or have been working on an international standard for the testing of software for some time. FTB Board Members include:

• Bernard Homes: Speaker and member of IEEE (Board Chair)
• Jacques Printz: Professor CNAM, Software Development
• Fabrice Grimbert: Technical Manager Eurogiciel
• Jean-Pierre Imbert: CEO JPI Conseil, Member of French Normalization Board AFNOR
• Stephan Hostie: consultant Synspace
• Olivier DiGiorgio: CEO Softexperior
• Robert Treffny: CEO iSQI

In this eValid application our Commercial License is being employed by a monitoring firm to perform in-depth, context preserving tests of multiple sites. They run over 2 million tests per year to support a range of Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The course on Software Testing is intended for second year Master of Science students, and is being given under the direction of Mr. Bernard Homes. eValid will be featured in the course that highlights the site analysis, functional testing, and performance testing capabilties of eValid's technology.

In a nutshell, AJAX-based web application development makes use of XML, XSLT, XMLHttpRequest logic, and a heavy dose of JScript, HTML, and DHTML to localize as much as possible of a user's interaction within the client browser space.

With AJAX methods the browser only requests information from the server when it needs to, rather than contacting the server every time a page is updated. The result is quicker response and a better user experience.

How does the 3D-Sitemap fit into your analysis needs? Users find that the 3D-SiteMap provides an analytic basis for studying how parts of their websites are organized, how they perform (comparatively), and how they depend on each other. Most users find that actual experience grows their intuition very quickly,

"We all trust software. All too frequently, this trust is misplaced. Larry Bernstein has created and applied quantitative techniques to develop trustworthy software systems. He and C.M. Yuhas have organized this quantitative experience into a book of great value to make software trustworthy for all of us." -- Barry Boehm, TRW Professor of Software Engineering, Director of Center for Software Engineering, University of South Carolina

Software engineering provides the knowledge base for producing reliable software products. With the availability of numerous case studies illustrating software engineering principles, it is now possible to measure certain approaches based on models derived from empirical data. The first book in the Wiley Series on Quantitative Software Engineering, Trustworthy Systems Through Quantitative Software ENgineering, (Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press; September 2005; $98.95; Cloth; 0-471-69691-9) provides an innovative, reliability-driven software engineering approach that equips students and professionals with a solid foundation in problem analysis.

About the Authors...

Lawrence Bernstein, BEE, MEE, is the series editor for the Wiley Series on Quantitative Software Engineering and Industry Research Professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. A fellow of the IEEE and ACDM, he has served as Chief Technical Officer of the Operations Systems Business Unit at Bell Laboratories.

C.M. Yuhas, MA, is a freelance writer who has published articles on network management in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication and IEEE Network.

In this project a well known e-commerce site uses eValid script-based three-tier transaction monitoring to assure compliance with a minimum performance criteria ("a simulated user has to be able to complete a transaction in less than 120 seconds").

What's important about this is that the trasaction uses a lot of JScript to handle local context, and this kind of monitoring is usually not possible with less-realistic kinds of web transaction monitoring technologies in common use.

In a nutshell, it works like this: Ping and Traceroute actions are "below" the HTTP/S level and indicate hardware availability. HTTP/S level operations successfully confirm service of pages. eValid browser-based playbacks confirm complete transactions. We call these transactions "coherent" because eValid maintains the browser state -- just as a real user does -- so multi-step transaction playbacks present the same state space to the server as would be presented by an actual user.

In this project a popular auction website used a specially packaged version of eValid to remote-capture detailed user behavior data. The eValid package was deployed to 1000's of field computers to obtain detailed end-user measurement of response time and performance data of how quickly the site behaved in a battery of two dozen separate tests.