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Showing posts from June, 2011

Yes, Processor is a Bottleneck. What’s next?

A processor bottleneck occurs when one or more processes consume the majority of the processor time.  This forces threads that are ready to be executed to wait in a queue for processor time. We identify if processor is bottleneck by investigating the processor utilization (Processor \ % Processor Time or System \ % Processor Time) and threads waiting in queue (System \ Processor Queue Length).  Please see here for more information. Once we have found that there is a bottleneck in terms of processor, we need to proceed ahead with further analysis.  Following are few of the questions in general without in context of some specific application, which I think we need to find answers for them and act accordingly. 1.        Is processor bottleneck due to lack of physical memory in the system? A memory bottleneck can sometimes look like a processor or disk bottleneck.  If the system does not have enough physical memory to store the code and data that are needed, the processor spends subs

QA Books List: Automation

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See complete QA books list  here Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010  (Jeff Levinson) Automated Database Applications Testing: Specification Representation for Automated Reasoning  (Rana Rarid Mikhail, Donald Berndt and Abraham Kandel) Automated Software Testing: Automation in Telecommunication  (Randall Mathura) Design Driven Testing: Test Smarter, Not Harder  (Matt Stephens and Doug Rosenberg) Mastering Software Quality Assurance: Best Practices, Tools and Techniques for Software Developers  (Murali Chemuturi) Selenium 1.0 Testing Tools: Beginner's Guide  (David Burns) Software Testing Automation Framework (Lambert M. Surhone, Mariam T. Tennoe, Susan F. Henssonow) Software Testing and QTP Automation  (Rajamanickam Antonimuthu) Software Testing using Visual Studio 2010  (Subashni S. Satheesh Kumar N.) Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests  (Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce) Implementing Automated Software Testing: How to Save Time and Lower Costs While Rai

Yes, Physical Memory is a Bottleneck. What’s next?

We identify if physical memory is bottleneck by investigating the rate of hard page faults (Memory \ Page Reads / sec) occurring in the system.  Please see here for more information. Once we have found that there is a bottleneck in terms of physical memory, we need to proceed ahead with further analysis.  Following are few of the questions in general without in context of some specific application, which I think we need to find answers for them and act accordingly. 1.        Is memory bottleneck due to memory consumed by OS / device drivers? A section of system memory, known as pool memory , is reserved for use by the operating system.  Pool memory is either paged or non-paged .  Monitor ‘Memory \ Pool Paged Bytes’, ‘Memory \ Pool Non-paged Bytes’ and ‘Memory \ Available Memory’ with respect to ‘Elapsed Time’.  Find out if ‘Available Memory’ is getting affected due to Pool Bytes (paged as well non-paged). Memory \ Available Bytes: The amount of physical memory (in bytes) availabl

Open Ended Questions for Senior Software Testing Professionals

Following are few of the open ended questions in context of software testing for senior software testing professionals especially test managers.  Senior professionals should be having at least minimum awareness in context of these questions.  The experts in their areas should be able to answer related questions with greater length though. Requirements & Specifications How to develop requirements with ‘Use Cases’? How to create a good test specification? How to spot and fix requirement errors early? How to distinguish business requirements from system requirements? How to assess that the requirements are complete? How many tests do you suggest per requirement? What is the importance of testing based on business, as well as system, requirements? What is your opinion on developer’s inclusion in requirements-based unit tests? How to develop test cases when requirements are not available or documented only at very high level? How do yo