Quality Assurance & Testing

A Software Quality Analyst is responsible for applying the principles and practices of software quality assurance throughout the software development life cycle. The role of a software quality analyst is often confused with the software testing role. Most software companies designate software testing as software quality assurance, whereas these roles are different.[1] Software Testing is product oriented, Software Quality Assurance is process oriented. SQA encompasses the entire software development process, which includes processes such as requirements definition, software design, coding, source code control, code reviews, change management, configuration management, testing, release management, and product integration. SQA is organized into goals, commitments, abilities, activities, measurements, and verifications[1]. Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test.[1] Software testing also provides an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. Test techniques include, but are not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs. Software testing, when done correctly, can increase overall software quality of conformance by testing that the product conforms to its requirements. Testing includes, but is not limited to: 1. Unit Testing 2. Functional Testing 3. Regression Testing 4. Performance Testing 5. Failover Testing 6. Usability Testing A number of agile methodologies use testing early in the development cycle to ensure quality in their products. For example, the test-driven development practice, where tests are written before the code they will test, is used in Extreme Programming to ensure quality.

What are the changes you can make in run-time settings?

The Run Time Settings that we make are:
a) Pacing - It has iteration count.
b) Log - Under this we have Disable Logging Standard Log and
c) Extended Think Time - In think time we have two options like Ignore think time and Replay think time.
d) General - Under general tab we can set the vusers as process or as multithreading and whether each step as a transaction.

How do you write user defined functions in LR? Give me few functions you wrote in your previous project?

Before we create the User Defined functions we need to create the external library (DLL) with the function. We add this library to VuGen bin directory. Once the library is added then we assign user defined function as a parameter. The function should have the following format:
__declspec (dllexport) char* <function name>(char*, char*)Examples of user defined functions are as follows:GetVersion, GetCurrentTime, GetPltform are some of the user defined functions used in my earlier project.

How do you debug a LoadRunner script?

VuGen contains two options to help debug Vuser scripts-the Run Step by Step command and breakpoints. The Debug settings in the Options dialog box allow us to determine the extent of the trace to be performed during scenario execution. The debug information is written to the Output window. We can manually set the message class within your script using the lr_set_debug_message function. This is useful if we want to receive debug information about a small section of the script only.

When do you disable log in Virtual User Generator, When do you choose standard and extended logs?

Once we debug our script and verify that it is functional, we can enable logging for errors only. When we add a script to a scenario, logging is automatically disabled. Standard Log Option: When you select
Standard log, it creates a standard log of functions and messages sent during script execution to use for debugging. Disable this option for large load testing scenarios. When you copy a script to a scenario, logging is automatically disabled Extended Log Option: Select
extended log to create an extended log, including warnings and other messages. Disable this option for large load testing scenarios. When you copy a script to a scenario, logging is automatically disabled. We can specify which additional information should be added to the extended log using the Extended log options.

What is a function to capture dynamic values in the web Vuser script?

Web_reg_save_param function saves dynamic data information to a parameter.

Where do you set automatic correlation options?

Automatic correlation from web point of view can be set in recording options and correlation tab. Here we can enable correlation for the entire script and choose either issue online messages or offline actions, where we can define rules for that correlation. Automatic correlation for database can be done using show output window and scan for correlation and picking the correlate query tab and choose which query value we want to correlate. If we know the specific value to be correlated, we just do create correlation for the value and specify how the value to be created.

How do you find out where correlation is required? Give few examples from your projects?

Two ways: First we can scan for correlations, and see the list of values which can be correlated. From this we can pick a value to be correlated. Secondly, we can record two scripts and compare them. We can look up the difference file to see for the values which needed to be correlated. In my project, there was a unique id developed for each customer, it was nothing but Insurance Number, it was generated automatically and it was sequential and this value was unique. I had to correlate this value, in order to avoid errors while running my script. I did using scan for correlation.

What is correlation? Explain the difference between automatic correlation and manual correlation?

Correlation is used to obtain data which are unique for each run of the script and which are generated by nested queries. Correlation provides the value to avoid errors arising out of duplicate values and also optimizing the code (to avoid nested queries). Automatic correlation is where we set some rules for correlation. It can be application server specific. Here values are replaced by data which are created by these rules. In manual correlation, the value we want to correlate is scanned and create correlation is used to correlate.

Why do you create parameters?

Parameters are like script variables. They are used to vary input to the server and to emulate real users. Different sets of data are sent to the server each time the script is run. Better simulate the usage model for more accurate testing from the Controller; one script can emulate many different users on the system.

Explain the recording mode for web Vuser script?

We use VuGen to develop a Vuser script by recording a user performing typical business processes on a client application. VuGen creates the script by recording the activity between the client and the server. For example, in web based applications, VuGen monitors the client end of the database and traces all the requests sent to, and received from, the database server. We use VuGen to: Monitor the communication between the application and the server; Generate the required function calls; and Insert the generated function calls into a Vuser script.