Announcing SO-Aware Test Workbench

Yesterday was a big day for Tellago Studios. After a few months hands down working, we announced the release of the SO-Aware Test Workbench tool which brings sophisticated performance testing and test visualization capabilities to theWCF world. This work has been the result of the feedback received by many of our SO-Aware and Tellago customers in terms of how to improve the WCF testing. More importantly, with the SO-Aware Test Workbench we are trying to address what has been one of the biggest challenges for WCF and BizTalk applications for years: LOAD TESTING!

That’s right, the SO-Aware Test Workbench includes a load testing engine that allows developers to execute load tests in just a couple of clicks and visualize the results in real time.

Here are some of the things you can do with SO-Aware Test Workbench!

Test Visualization

SO-Aware Test Workbench visualizes the execution records of a specific test, giving the tester or QA professional a very intuitive perspective of the behavior of the service.

Test Group Execution

With SO-Aware Test Workbench, testers or QA professionals can execute entire groups of tests as single unit. This feature takes full advantage of SO-Aware’s test categorization capabilities.

Load Testing

The SO-Aware Test Workbench provides a complete load testing suite that facilitates the modeling and execution of load tests with only a couple of clicks. Even more importantly, the SO-Aware Test Workbench provides real time visualization of test execution, giving the tester visually detailed information of the test runtime behavior.

The current version of the SO-Aware Test Workbench implements four fundamental load testing algorithms:

• Simple Rate Strategy:This strategy simulates a fixed number of clients with a specific delay between calls. For instance, we can use this strategy to simulate a service being consumed by a 100 clients with 2 milliseconds delay between calls.
• Linear Strategy:This strategy is very similar to the simple rate technique but it simulates a random number of clients between two limits. For instance, we can use this strategy to simulate our service being invoked by 100-200 clients during a specific period of time.
• Burst Strategy: This strategy is specifically designed for Recovery Testing. Essentially, the burst strategy simulates a concurrent number of clients during “Burst” followed by a “Burst Delay” on which the service experiences no activity. For instance, we can use this strategy to simulate spike patterns of web service consumption.
• Sawtooth Strategy:This strategy simulates a concurrent number of clients that increase or decrease abruptly based on a specific variance. This strategy can be used to stress test the service by simulating large but predictable changes in the number of concurrent clients.

If you are interested on learning more about Load Testing, you should check out this fantastic blog post from my colleague Gustavo Machado where he goes deep into the details of the different load testing strategies.

Local Test Projects

SO-Aware Test Workbench helps testers and QA professionals model and execute web service tests in their local environment without having to deploy them to the SO-Aware repository. This feature is particularly relevant to create variations of tests created in SO-Aware for specific business cases.

Test Report

The SO-Aware Test Workbench complements its rich visualization capabilities with the ability to export the results of the tests to various formats such as Adobe PDF or Excel. Testers or QA professionals can take advantage of this feature to represent the results of the tests in a format that can be easily understood by developers and architects.

Intrigued? Would like to learn more? Check out this Endpoint TV episode with Ron Jacobs on which we demo end to end the capabilities of the SO-Aware Test Workbench!