It's about time that web applications -- and the validation and verification problems that they present, very non-trivial ones, by the way -- got a little respect!

So, sure enough, here comes along a new Workshop on Testing, Analysis and Verification of Web Services and Applications TAV-WEB 2006, close on the heels for web applications what the long-running series of ISSTA conferences has focused on for nearly two decades. (The TAV-WEB workshop is a "sub-conference" of ISSTA.)

The topics proposed are, for the most part, a simple transliteration of the same kinds of technology approaches that have formed the mainstay of software test and validation theory for years. But the re-formulation of these notions in the context of "the web" is exciting, and good news for everyone.

According to ISE President Doug Vucevic, ISE is licensed by the Professional Engineers (Ontario) and by the Ministry of Education (Ontario) to grant the Graduate Diploma in Software Engineering. In this program ISE gives students the skills and foundations for careers and advancement in the software engineering arena.

The two courses where eValid will be used are: (1) Quality Assurance and Software Testing, for functional testing of web applications; and, (2) Computer Systems Performance Engineering, for web server loading and performance analysis. Attendance at both courses is strictly limited to 10 students to assure the maximum level of instructor/student interaction.

You can reach Doug for further information at doug@softwareeng.org.

Answer: Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber and the story is told that his answer to a reporter who asked him why he robbed banks was "...because that's where the money is."

It's the same with testing: one tests where the defects that have the greatest impact are most likely to show up, and that, of course, is at the GUI level. At the user's level, whatever that is.

In addition, the "meaning" of tests at the GUI level is probably more intuitive (if the GUI is a good one) so the actual tests are probably more intuitive than a unit-level test run on a low-level back-end function. And, furthermore, if a basic test of a GUI-accessed sequence is not a "real scenario" -- well, what is that functionality doing there in the first place? [Or, wouldn't that be a proper error detection: "useless function discovered in GUI"?]

If 80% of the testing is done on the GUI you might just want to turn around and ask, "Why wasn't it more like 95%?" Maybe 95%+ with some really complex scenarios that stress the entire application end to end.

For web-enabled applications, particularly those that are built with the newest application development methodologies and approaches like Ajax, testing from the GUI may be the only alternative. That's one reason why eValid's ease of use is of such great value in these cases.

• Setting & Restoring Profiles
  The eValid engine has on the order of 125 different settings and switches that affect how the underlying test engine records, plays, searches, and synchronizes. Yes, we know, it sometimes can be painful to keep track of what you've set, and what option you've chosen. We admit it can be daunting.

  Presto, the solution is simple: use the eValid facility for Setting and Restoring Profiles that keep track of a current group of settings and, probably just as important, let you recover a prior group. (That is, of course, provided you saved them. We don't have a way of automatically reading your mind to remember the settings you chose earlier.)

• JRE Installation Issues
  eValid uses Java Applets in a couple of key places: The 3D-SiteMap shows dependency relations between and among pages that have been scanned and analyzed by the site analysis function, and the Performance Charts display numeric data form the various eValid log files. As you know, Java Applets require a working Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to work correctly.

  Most of the time (depending on your operating system) the built-in Microsoft VM will be enabled, and you'll have no problem. But if you see a blank screen where you are supposed to see something else, or if you see a message like "Object doesn't support this property of method," then you have to equip your machine with the latest JRE from Sun.

  It's easy enough to do. To get the latest JRE you simply Click on JRE Download Instructions and follow the instructions there. Once done -- or if you just want to know which JRE you have -- you can Verify The Java JRE Version installed on your machine. Once done your 3D-SiteMap and Performance Charts will awaken!

The Wikipedia entry for Agile Software Development is a good place to brush up on the concept. In a nutshell, "agile" means "adaptive to immediate needs" and the fastest-possible build and test methods. This is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from the conventional "waterfall chart" type of development in which requirements, design, implementation and test are all separate functions that are done time-sequentially and probably at very high cost.

(Please note here that it's the test methods implied by agile development projects that are the main concern to us. We naturally enough believe we already know the best way to quickly and cleanly and easily test and confirm an application being developed with "agile methods" if it involves any kind of web browser or web services enablement.)

To dig deeper, you can also visit the Agile Alliance website where you will find reference to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development dating from 2001.

Possibly also of interest if you are tracking this area is the new on-line magazine and newsletter Agile Journal featuring Liz Barnett as Editor in Chief. Vol. 1 No. 1 is now available. For a first issue, this one seems to be very well done, including book reviews, a couple of good feature articles, and a bevy of other resources.

OK, you can go ahead and wonder: If you cross AJAX technology with the Agile development methodology what do you get? (Answer: we don't know either, but it has to be interesting. We will just have to wait and see!)

Among the more common requests that we get is: "How do I get eValid to time a file upload?" In field practice, you would want to time a file upload if your application is copying something from your client machine (which is where eValid is running) into a website or web applications.

As this File Upload Recording example illustrates, this could be sending an image as an attachment in a browser-based (over the web) email account.

Probably the second most common request regarding file processing that we get is: "How do I get eValid to time how long a file takes to download? This mostly arises from applications that require some kind of download process, typically one using the standard Windows file download modal dialog protocol.

As this File Download Recording example shows, the "trick" is to synchronize the timing on a part of the file download protocol display, waiting for "Download Complete".

If you have a particular problem you want to solve using eValid testing-in-the-browser technology to solve please Contact Us. Be sure when asking your question or posing your problem to give as many details as you can!

There seem to be [at least] two different flavors of this: (i) vary the test data to see what effect that has on detections of problems in the unit under test; or, (ii) vary the actual program as a way to find out if the current test set can detect the change. The former generally is called "random testing" and the latter has been called "mutation testing".

The concept of adding randomness to improve the quality of testing has even turned up in a slightly different way in the eValid web testing engine, where there are commands that "randomize" things like the wait time interval: WaitRandom. This command is used so that either server loading scenarios or transaction monitoring tests can appear even more realistic by having the simulated user actions arrive less constantly.

Interest in this area seems to be growing, as suggested by the First International Workshop on Random Testing (RT2006), Portland, Maine, July 2006. (This is co-located with the already-mentioned ISSTA Conference.

For more information you might also check out the notion of Fuzz Testing in Google. Also worthy of note is the succinct Mutation Analysis description in Wikipedia.

The solution was to use a couple of eValid LoadTest scenarios to simulate increasing numbers of simulated users, while at the same time keeping track of server CPU utilizations. As many as 15 machines, each running up to 20 eValid playbacks of a highly data-intensive session, was enough of a load so the problems with the server were evident. The result: improvement of capacity by a factor of about three.

Here for your information here is a catalog of other eValid Success Stories.

This is a simple enough idea but achieving good results in practice has been elusive, at best, and frustrating, at worst. Even so, the results are promising enough that there is an active community of researchers and experimenters who are working on advancing this technology. If this is your forte, then take note that Dave Card, Editor in Chief of the widely respected Journal of Systems And Software, is looking for papers for a special issue on Model-Based Software Testing.

Verism Technologies' involvement is particularly timely in view of the recent release of the International Edition of eValid, eValid/I, which provides full support for two-byte (unicode) local language customizations and operating environments.

Verism Technologies joins a growing family of Cooperating Organizations who are involved with eValid technology in a variety of ways. The larger eValid team includes active resellers, academic users, contractors, and Application Service Providers around the world.

• The Adaptation and Evolution in Web Systems Engineering (AEWSE'06) workshop is being organized by staff from Web & Information Systems Engineering Lab at Vrije Universiteit (Free University), Brussels, Belgium. That lab specializes in human/interface aspects of web-based information systems.

• The Workshop on Web Measurement and Metrics (WMM06), with Dr. Emilia Mendes serving as Workshop Chair. This workshop promises to focus on web reliability, web testing, and web quality issues -- and on the all-important area of estimating web project size (and budget) from various web metrics.

But that's not true for everyone. We know that, even though our approach is quite flexible, it is not completely satisfying to some classes of users, either because it is too restrictive or because it doesn't fit into available budgets or schedules.

So, to provide eValid support that doesn't have all of the usual license constraints we've developed an alternative type of license what we call a Commercial License. In brief, this license allows for unlimited usage of eValid on unlimited machines on a "pay as you go" basis. There are licenses for monitoring services and monitoring agents, for functional testing, for server loading, and for site analysis -- all the major kinds of projects that eValid users perform. To learn more about what this might mean to you, check out our ASP Support description page.

But not necessarily, Meyer holds. While costs are very low on a per-staff-hour basis -- and this fact alone often is the main reason why many outsourcing contracts are sold -- total project costs don't necessarily show a corresponding decrease. Instead of a "crisis" it may be that this is an "opportunity" for the software engineering community, says Prof. Meyer.

Meyer argues that "...software engineering -- a systematic discipline based on quality tools..." ought to make it possible to make offshore development work to everyone's benefit: local experts and (low priced) offshore programmers alike. Meyer argues, "Quality is indeed the central issue." That how good what's delivered is JUST as important as the cost -- in the long term scheme of things.

To focus more attention on how this can be done, Meyer is putting together a workshop to help foment in-depth discussions of the technical issues raised by mixed on-shore/off-shore development strategies. Check out Software Engineering Approaches for Offshore and Outsourced Development (SEAFOOD), scheduled for October 2006 in Zurich, Switzerland. Food for thought. Very healthy food for thought.

About this complex problem Larry Bernstein, Industry Research Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, writes: "The performance of new systems capabilities for government agencies and industry are often examined using simulators. The simulators provide insight into how the new capabilities will perform. The simulators shed little light on reliability, complexity and other software engineering aspects of the proposed changes. The correlation between the complexities of the proposed capabilities with that of an earlier system can be used to bound the trustworthiness, possible schedule and potential costs for implementing the new capability.

Larry continues, "I call this the "Lambda Protocol." It combines software reliability with software sizing theory. With performance, reliability, schedule and cost-estimates in hand, system and software engineers can make essential engineering tradeoffs as they set a course of action."

Here is Larry's complete article: Taking Software Requirements from Folklore to Analysis.

One possibility is to use eValid playbacks in a battery of machines as remote test drivers "over the web". In addition the the basic simplicity of this approach -- recording scripts is quite easy -- you also have the advantage that you really can't goof up the simulated sessions to wind up lying to yourself. [This is true because eValid does not use any approximation techniques: tests from multiple eValid copies on one or several or machine ALL involve full browser session execution every time. One of our customers said it this way: "No Virtual Users!"]

Here is a typical remote loading project we did that performs the entire server loading experiment "over the web". Here for your information here is a catalog of other eValid Success Stories.

A component of the evaluation involves assessing the technical quality of the websites. Technical quality underpins the quality of service experience. Ideally, the website technology used should be transparent and not "obscure" the experience of the website with either irrelevant displays of technical prowess or errors and failures.

In line with developing a user-centric evaluation BRS has applied eValid's site analysis feature to these 100 corporate websites to develop comparative "technical quality of experience" estimates. The eValid scans deliver a number of website specific metrics such as page size, broken links, site structure etc. The metrics chosen all of which relate to the overall performance of the website and its quality. Here is the complete Who's Hot, Who's Not article.

The course is attended by some 85 students, about 30% undergraduate level and 70% graduate level. Each student is equipped with a complete eValid copy, including complete documentation, for use in the course laboratory sessions.

Please Note: If you are teaching a course and would like to consider eValid for use in your classroom or lab, please contact us so we can work out the details.

• Powerful DOM-based validations that include Adaptive Playback.
• New and better playback only clients for LoadTest runs.
• New features in the popular 3D-SiteMap to let you see website structures in even more detail.
• There's a whole new look and feel for the GUI, with more-modern icons and simplified displays.
• A special International Edition that supports all 2-byte character sets and provides full localization support.
• Completely reorganized online documentation.

If you want to try it out here is the Product Evaluation Copy Download Form. eValid users who have a current maintenance subscription are in most cases entitled to the update without charge. To find out for sure Ask Here and be sure to include your Customer ID.

These projects differ in their maturity, the extension of technologies they cover or the specialized server-side language they target. You will find below a list of some open source projects worth tracking down:

• AjaxAnywhere is designed to turn any set of existing JSP or JSF components into AJAX-aware components without complex JavaScript coding.
• Dojo is the Open Source JavaScript toolkit that helps you build serious applications in less time.
• Rialto (Rich Internet Application Toolkit) is AJAX-based cross browser JavaScript widgets library. It can be encapsulated in JSP, JSF, .Net or PHP graphic components.
• Sajax is an open source tool to make programming websites using the AJAX framework
• Ajax.NET is an implementation of the AJAX technology for the .NET environment.
• Rico provides a very simple interface for registering AJAX request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as AJAX response objects
• qooxdoo is an advanced open-source JavaScript based toolkit.
• CPAINT (Cross-Platform Asynchronous INterface Toolkit) is a multi-language toolkit that helps web developers design and implement AJAX web applications with ease and flexibility
• AjaxAC is an open-source framework written in PHP, used to develop AJAX applications.

But as "the Web" grows and grows, inevitably there will be a need to re-think some of the ways things are done. The vast majority of web applications (which includes "everything" web related) has been don in an ad hoc fashion, and this increasingly is leading to subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) problems of quality, reliability, and maintainability.

Thus a special issue of Engineering Letters devoted to "Web Engineering" seems to be a idea whose time is 100% right. Organized by Prof. Spiros Sirmakessis and Prof. Giannis Tzimas, both at Computer Technology Institute, in Patras, Greece, the special issue promises to have a range of topics on web engineering ranging from collaborative web application development to legal issues. Here is where you get the Special Issue Details.

Some of the reasons for the relatively limited (or not so well known) introduction of web services (so far) are addressed in part at the International Workshop on Web Services Modeling and Testing, scheduled for June 2006 in Polermo, Italy. The workshop attacks some of the main issues surrounding affirming web quality services, which largely surround the technically difficult process of accurately and reliably specifying what's what, so that an application that uses web services as the implementation base can, itself, be validated. As we all know, if a technology can't be verified and validated it probably won't catch as quickly as if it can be.

It's not a simple matter, and this workshop may answer some fundamental questions. And, it might be a very good excuse to schedule a trip to Sicily if you haven't been there (certainly recommended). But don't even think about renting a car there! Take taxis!

For the first time you can do functional testing, regression testing, server loading, and site analysis 100% in a 2-byte character set mode. This means you can perform critical web-site testing and analysis functions in such languages as Kanjii, Korean, Chinese, and any other language version or Windows Operating System version requiring localization via Unicode.

For details on how to obtain a copy of eValid/I (International Edition) please Request An International Edition (eValid/I) Evaluation Copy and we will send you the required evalid/I license keys.

The website he maintains, Methods & Tools Newsletter, makes these resources available without charge. One of the best features of this collection of information is that he makes each quarterly number of Methods & Tools available to Download as a PDF Documents at no charge. There's a wealth of information on this site and it's highly worth talking a look!

You'll find some comparative analysis of some public sites on our own website [see above]. We invite you to look at the data and see if our analysis of the user experience interests you. We based our calculation of use of two metrics:

»	Ease of Navigation, Qn, is a combination of the average download rate, average page depth, and percentage of non-broken pages.
»	Quality of Maintenance, Qm, is a combination of the relative age of pages combined with the number of unavailable pages.

The resulting product, Qn * Qm, yields the Quality Score. This number lets us rank order the sites so that the highest scoring site is the one with the best ease of navigation combined with the best quality of maintenance..

Here is a description of one particular scan we did: FT 150 Site Comparison And, here for your information here is a catalog of other eValid Success Stories.

This year you can see eValid in action at CeBIT, represented by Dr. Jurgen Pitschke of BCS/Germany. They can be found at CeBIT the Pavillon of Saxony, Hall 4, Booth F060. Making an appointment is the best way to make sure you get full attention. You can do this on the CeBIT website, or you can contact Dr. Pitschke direct by phone at +49 (0) 351 205 026 40, or through the BCS website, or by email to cebit@sw-products.de.

The original article that seems to do the best to define the AJAX approach, is AJAX: A New Approach to Web Applications, by Jesse James Garrett, 18 February 2005. As subsequent interviews with him have indicated, Garrett popularized the name "AJAX" but disclaims having invented the term.

Garrett's article points out (in the lengthly 13 March 2005 Q&A that follows the main body of the piece) that "AJAX" is rather simpler than "Asynchronous JavaScript + CSS + DOM + XMLHttpRequest" to say and use. Garrett's success as a popularizer of the methodology is a direct outgrowth of his role as Director of User Experience Strategy at Adaptive Path, an organization of which he is a founder.

But perhaps the best indicator that a methodology has arrived is that there is a lengthy Wikipedia Explanation of AJAX (programming). This article includes some very valuable Pros & Cons about the methodology -- must reading!

The AJAX approach neatly circumvents some of the technical difficulties that always have been associated with Java Applets, which do [or attempt to do] roughly the same kind if thing, local processing of user data with minimum HTTP traffic unless it is absolutely necessary, but with modern GUI elements. The jury on which approach will dominate is still out, but a lot of smart money appears to be landing on the AJAX square.

Where this fits into issues of Web Application Quality should be clear. Java Applets are, as everyone knows, quite difficult to test because Applets are opaque and, as a result, somewhat less-than-perfect methods have to be used in creating regression tests for them. AJAX applications, on the other hand, are "pure browser" implementations, and as such they yield nicely to modern technologies.

The WQN journal/blog will focus on every aspect of Web Quality, and will include information on such topics as:

• Technical events of all kinds that relate to web quality and testing technology issues.
• Descriptions and "mini-reviews" of recent literature.
• Pointers to material of interest to those whose concerns focus on web quality issues.
• Material on applications of eValid technology to contemporary web quality issues.
• Now and then we hope to include short essays by technologists and practitioners about their experience with web quality issues.

If you want to look up an article that appeared in QTN we have provided this Archive of Prior QTN Issues. New requesters for QTN subscriptions will be included instead in the regular emailings announcing contents of WQN.

The main thing eValid as a test monitor brings to the table is the capability to provide detailed, user-oriented, contextual playbacks of any kind of activity. This means that eValid brings a set of Significant Differences available for use by customers. In effect, if you can browse it you can use an eValid playback to capture the identically same activity.

For your information here is a catalog of several other eValid Success Stories.