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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

XStudio 1.3: Accelerated startup

In XStudio 1.3, a new innovative system is implemented to pre-fetch icons and compute (using the Java 2D API) derived icons (based on the following algorithms: concatenation, HSB filter, opacity, grey-out, overlay, rescale etc.) much faster (3 times faster than downloading them individually).

This will drastically increase start-up time (especially in Java Web Start mode).

XStudio 1.3: Proxy launcher

One big issue in testing distributed environment is how to publish scripts execution on each component.

Let's imagine you have to test a VoIP framework that comprises 3 different machines: a
Client, a Gateway and a Server. To test the data flow, you will need to deploy for each test (at least) 3 scripts on each of those and run them at the same time. And that's were Test Management systems (even very expensive ones!) generally fails.

XStudio 1.3 includes a new launcher called the proxy launcher and a new kind of agent called the XSubAgent. An XSubAgent is basically a kind of XAgent instance embedding an XML-RPC server and which communicates only through this media.

Here is the flow:
  • You create your test campaign from XStudio and start it
  • The tests in this campaign are associated to the proxy launcher which can be running on any host
  • The proxy launcher is configured with a list of individual XSubAgents, launchers and configurations
  • The proxy launcher will just contact individually all the XSubAgents and will forward the requests to execute extracted sub-tests
  • Each XSubAgent will execute its specific script and will return results to the proxy
  • The proxy consolidates results and logs and returns it to XStudio.

Hence, one single test is split by the proxy launcher in different scripts that are executed simultaneously on different XSubAgents located on the Client, the Gateway and the Server of our VoIP Framework.

XStudio 1.3: Tests and test cases versioning



One feature requested for long was the test and test cases versioning. Indeed, it was possible to track the progression and regression of test campaigns in time but there were not yet any way to manage the versions of the tests/test cases in parallel. Hence, if you are looking at an old campaign session and see that the test A did fail, you were not able to know what was the test A at this time since it may have changed afterward.

Starting in XStudio 1.3, all changes in tests and test cases are tracked and versioned so that you can get their states at any point in time.

Information versioned are:

Tests:
  • Description
  • Priority
  • Canonical path
  • Prerequisites
  • Additional information
Test cases:
  • Procedure tree
  • Description
  • Use description as testplan flag
  • Additional information

Currently, the system associate to each revision a date of submission and an revision (an automatically incremented number). Here is how the GUI looks like:


In the future, a flagging system will be added so that the user can flag ALL test at a T time with a personalized label. It will also be possible to run a campaign session with the tests as they were defined in the past.

Monday, May 17, 2010

XStudio 1.3: TRAC integrated

In XStudio 1.3, a new third-party bug-tracking database is integrated: the very popular TRAC.

This integration has been done using TRAC's XML-RPC API.

Many other bug-tracking system provide XML-RPC interface (i.e. JIRA) so this will ease very much of those in the future as well.