What is Disaster Recovery Testing in Software Testing?

Load Testing Page Load Time Performance Testing

1 minute read

Disaster Recovery Testing is the process to ensure that an organisation can recover data, restore business critical applications and continue operations after an interruption of its services, critical IT failure or complete disruption.

A disaster recovery test (DR test) checks every step from a disaster recovery plan as outlined in an organisation’s business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) planning process.

Usually, the DR testing process is neglected by many organisation which makes things very difficult to recover when disruption occurs.

Main goals of Disaster Recovery Testing

Communications, data recovery and application recovery are typically a focus of all disaster recovery testing.

Disaster Recovery Plan

It’s very important to understand the following:

  • how long does it take for the services to recover?
  • how long does it take to recover the data?
  • which are the services/data affected?
  • how will the system behave if part of the infrastructure becomes unavailable?

Disaster recovery tests should be scheduled and executed on a regular basis throughout the year and be incorporated into all planned maintenance and staff training.
Audit logs and other data should be analysed to determine what worked / didn’t work as expected, what changes need to be made in the DR plan.

Disaster Recovery Testing can be executed while the application is under heavy load and carried out in conjunction with Load Testing and Website Speed Testing.

What is Stress Testing in Software Testing?

Load Testing Stress Testing

1 minute read

Stress testing is a simulation technique used in multiple industries to determine their reactions to different unexpected situations. In software testing, you can benefit from stress testing by showing how the application behaves under extreme load conditions.

Shortly, stress testing is used to find the limit, at which the system or software or hardware breaks, by testing with overwhelming data or resources.

Stress tests are usually cloud simulation models that test hypothetical scenarios, also highly customised stress testing methodology is also often utilised.

Use stress tests to test the stability & reliability of your system and infrastructure. These tests determines the robustness and error handling under extremely heavy load conditions.

Main goal of stress testing 

To reveal application bugs that can appear only under high load conditions. These issues can include race condition issues, memory leaks, and others.
Stress testing allows you to simulate and identify the application’s weak points. For stress testing to be successful, the application should display appropriate error message while it is under extreme conditions.

Example of stress tests

You can have a web server, that can be stress tested using various scripts, scripts, requests, bots, and various denial of service tools in order to have a better understanding of the performance of a web site during peak loads.It monitors system resources such as CPU, memory, I/O etc., and checks the ability of the application to recover back to normal when the workload is reduced.

Why does it take forever to load a website?

Page Load Time Test Automation Website Speed Testing

1 minute read

Have you even asked yourself what happens behind the scenes when you enter a website’s URL address in the browser and press Enter?

All websites contain a lot of assets that need to load in order for a website to look good, be functional and ready for you to interact with, some of these assets can be:

  • Javascript files (JS files)
  • CSS files
  • Images
  • HTML
  • Fonts
  • Documents
  • Media
  • Others

So in order for a website to load, it need to load all these assets in a fast way, in order to please its visitors. Nowadays, fast means a matter of seconds (1-2 seconds), a few seconds more and your visitors will stop entering your website, SEO engines will give your web pages a poor ranking and so on.

The are situations when websites keep loading forever, and this may be caused by various issues:

  • a 3rd party widget (customer support, analytics, marketing, email) is not loading properly
  • your server where your website is hosted is not able to cope with the load
  • the web server is slow
  • too many visitors (this would be a nice problem to have)
  • the APIs are not responding to your requests,
  • the Database queries are pending
  • the CDN where you host your static assets is not responding
  • your website is not optimised to load the minimum assets for your website
  • and others depending on your hardware infrastructure, location, architecture stack etc

So, when your try to load a website, and the loading spinner is not stopping, there are a lot of potential bottleneck you’d have to consider. You can run a free website speed test and get more insight on the potential problems and try to debug what’s really happing with the loading time of a specific website.

Website Software Testing Services

Load Testing Mobile Testing Performance Testing Stress Testing Test Automation Visual Regression Testing Website Speed Testing

1 minute read

We test your website for free! Get started here!

Let us do the testing for you every month or every release.

We test your website, web services or APIs before any live release. This way you can ensure to release with much more confidence and don’t get any regression bugs.

We run a full set for your website, web application or mobile application:

  • functional tests
  • load tests
  • performance tests
  • page speed tests
  • accessibility tests
  • cross browser testing
  • security tests (XSS, CSRF, SQL Injections etc)

The first report is free, all you have to do get in touch with us.

We test your website for free! Get started here!

Introducing LF Page Speed Monitoring – Easily track speed of your website and compare with competitors

Cloud Services Page Load Time Test Automation Website Speed Testing

2 minutes read

Customers conversion rate is a very important metric for every online business, even if you have a simple website, a blog, an ecommerce marketplace or a complex platform. At LoadFocus, we saw this as an opportunity to add a new service under the same plans, a service which will help you keep an eye on the speed of your website and be able to always compare with any on your competitors.
We wanted to make it easier to monitor any changes that happen on an hourly/daily/weekly or monthly basis with your website, how it renders and how it loads comparing to your top competitors.

LF Page Speed Monitoring

LF Page Speed Monitoring is an easy way to monitor speed of your website from the cloud with LoadFocus. To put it simply, Page Speed Monitoring is like running a Page Speed Testing, but instead of giving you the full report once, you get it every day. It’s a technology that allows you to schedule Page Speed Tests as fast as every hour and you get alerted when your test runs and if anything changes comparing to your previous runs.

page speed monitoring

The best part? You can see how your website rendered for each run, we take full page screenshots for your website and your competitors along with full performance metrics. LF Page Speed Monitoring provides an easy option to monitor all your websites from the cloud. LF Page Speed Monitoring alerts you when changes occur for any of your websites or competitors’ websites.

Configuration

All you need to do is add your website URL, specify the email addresses on which you want to get alerted for reports and changes, define your competitors, and launch.

page speed monitoring new test

Pricing

With Page Speed Monitoring, you have flexible configuration options to closely match your monitoring needs and this services comes along within the same existent plans.

Setting up a new monitor with LF Page Speed Monitoring is a matter of seconds, just set schedule time for page speed tests to run on a regular basis and get notified when tests changes happen or at every run.

page speed monitoring report

 

LF Page Speed Monitoring is available today.

What is the Document Object Model (DOM)?

Automated Website Testing & Monitoring Test Automation UI Testing

1 minute read

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an object-oriented representation of the web page, representing the document as nodes and objects (HTML tags), which can be modified with a scripting language.

DOM is a programming API for HTML and XML documents.

The DOM is created when the webpage loads inside the browsers, HTML you write is parsed by the browser and turned into the DOM.

If you View Source the web page, the content may and most certainly will be different from DOM’s content. Programming languages, like Javascript, connect to the page and can dynamically change the content of the DOM.

If you open Dev Tools in any browser, you can see a live representation of the DOM and in most simple cases, the visual representation of the DOM will be just like your simple HTML, but remember that JavaScript can manipulate the DOM (dynamically adding content to your web page through AJAX calls).

So, if you are using Ajax to get content from elsewhere, the DOM is going to be very different than your original HTML, similar happens with client side templating.

How to Design your Load Testing Scenarios

Test Automation

3 minutes read

So you’ve run your first free load test with LoadFocus. What’s next?

Load Testing Goal

The main goal of load testing is to see whether the application can sustain the increased load on the server or will it crash the server. Your applocation can be a website, some API or web serivices you use or expose to customers, a wordpress blog or any other public URL that you expose. Also, to identify areas in the architecture of your application which don’t function properly, either too slow or not functioning at all.

Load Testing would provide data for rendering or doing different actions on the website with a number of concurrent users and still have a good performance.

Prerequisites

There are a few prerequisites that you need to gather in order to run a successful load test assessment.
Enter you Analytics tool and gather the top 3 locations from where your customers access your website or web services.

Load Test Locations supported:

  • US East (Virginia)
  • US West (North California)
  • EU West (Ireland)
  • EU Central (Frankfurt)
  • Asia Pacific (Singapore)
  • Asia Pacific (Mumbai)

Also, find out how many users accessed your application per second.

Define supported councurrent users/second, expected response time and any other client side (lantency, hits/second) or server side (CPU, Memory etc) performance metrics you want to consider.

Make sure the load tested URL is up and publicly available before running any load or performance tests
Check the HTTP method for your tests (GET is the request done by browsers when accessing a website or an API endpoint) and protocol (HTTP vs. HTTPS).

Have in mind that this number may change in the future, when you send a big email campaign or post a new viral article on your blog. So you need to be prepared to handle this new load in order not to lose potential customer or get SEO downgrded, because of your slow website (system under test).

You need to determine what good performance means for your System under Test, because the system under test will start throwing errors and maybe start crashing under a heavy load of actions/concurrent users

Load Test Scenarios

And create the proper load testing scenarios to simulate hits from your customers’ locations.

  • Start with a small number of clients (1, 20, 50, 100 concurrent users / second). Try to increase the number of the clients gradually to understand how your API, Website or WebApp behaves.
  • Run GET requests on your main website pages (top 5 web pages)
  • Identify and run API Login request (usually these are POST requests made with a POST Body to an API endpoint)
  • Make GET or POST requests with an authenticated or non-authenticated user
  • Monitor for each test:

Next Steps

Load testing is an iterative process. Once you find one issue, you need to re-run the load test and find the next!

Run your free load test today!

LoadFocus is cloud Performance, load and stress testing tool which provides the infrastructure and the ability to run all these tests in less than a few minutes, keep history of the results, compare different runs to inspect performance improvements or performance degradation.

More resources can be found here:

Top 15 reasons why load testing is important to your website
Load Testing for RESTful APIs in the Cloud