Testing guides and best practices

• Planning for availability in the enterprise
  High availability is an achievable service-level characteristic to which every enterprise aspires. But too often, enterprises do not conduct comprehensive availability planning, resulting in damaging outages when load spikes or bandwidth is swamped for a variety of possible reasons. Applying the information in this article and in the accompanying spreadsheet to your availability planning will help your enterprise reach its high-availability goals.
  
  
• WebSphere Version 5 application development handbook
  This Redbook covers the modeling, development, and testing stages of software development for programmers and team leaders who are setting up or migrating J2EE development projects on WebSphere Application Server V5 or WebSphere Studio V5.
  
  
• Performance testing protocol for WebSphere Application Server-based applications
  This article provides a protocol for conducting performance testing to determine optimal environmental settings for WebSphere Application Server-based Applications in a variety of load scenarios. Topics include planning the performance environment, performing the actual testing, and measuring the application's performance characteristics.
  
  
• Proactive application monitoring
  Application monitoring involves more than just technical data that shows how an application is performing. This article discusses application monitoring methods, tools, and justifications, and provides a useful overview of which components of a Web application to monitor, what metrics to collect, when to collect them, and how to use them.
  
  
• Testing strategies for dysfunctional software organizations
  Significant, aggravating, and sometimes costly defects in software products have become the norm rather than the exception. Why isn't software testing more effective? The simple answer is that most software products are not tested thoroughly enough, leading to the present environment in which both users and software development organizations expect software to have significant bugs. To make organizations more successful at testing, managers must must have a deeper understanding of how testing works and implement more rigorous testing strategies. This article discusses some of the roadblocks to effective testing and explains how to overcome them.
  
  
• Testing, fun? Really?
  Many developers see both unit testing and functional testing as onerous tasks that get in the way of their "real" work of. Yet they also know how important testing is for software quality. Unit testing can become a natural part of your development procedures through the lightweight programming methodology known as extreme programming (XP). This methodology requires thorough unit tests for every function before it is added to the code base, and explains why this unit testing must still be accompanied by effective functional testing. This article explores the differences between unit testing and functional testing, and outlines a process for using them to enhance your daily development work.
  
  

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Testing with Rational tools

• Getting started with automated testing: Road map to success
  This article addresses several audiences. If you're doing automated testing or using Rational testing tools for the first time, this article will give you the pointers you need in order to get started with automated testing with Rational TestManager and Rational Robot. If you have some experience with automated testing but have not used Rational testing tools, this article will give you a brief overview of their capabilities. tools. Finally, if you have experience with both automated testing and the Rational tool suite, this article offers solutions to some common problems and describes some new approaches to make your automated testing with Rational tools more effective.
  
  
• Testing J2EE applications with Rational PurifyPlus
  This article presents a proven and efficient way to use Rational PurifyPlus to test server-side Java applications running on Apache Jakarta Tomcat and including JavaServer Pages (JSPs) and Java servlets . You can apply similar workarounds to other Java application servers. The author has successfully used this technique with various J2EE applications running on WebSphere Application Server and on BEA WebLogic Versions 5.1, 6.0, and 6.1.
  
  
• Applying Rational tools to a simple J2EE-based project -- Part 8: Testing the software
  In this stage of the ongoing sample project, testing progresses to the point where Rational testing tools are used extensively for unit testing, functional testing, and scripted GUI testing.
  
  
• Getting the most from your automated testing tools
  This article by Rational Quality Assurance Manager Laura Rose focuses on the benefits of automated testing. It offers tips on using test scripts for vendor calibration and performance verification, as well as for loading and lab setup. Other topics include how to use load-testing tools for performance testing, and how to conduct non-intrusive system testing.
  
  
• Bridging the gap between black box and white box testing
  In this article, Rational automation guru Brian Bryson describes how the "4+1 view model of software architecture" applies to building a testing scheme for assuring full system quality.
  
  
• IBM Software Services for WebSphere Best Practice Guide: Testing WebSphere applications with the Rational Unified Process
  Testing applications based on the J2EE component architecture is a complex task. This comprehensive, 35-page paper focuses on the Rational Unified Process (RUP), and uses it as a model to describe best practices for all phases of testing, from creating a test plan to regression testing and defect tracking. (PDF)
  
  

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Additional information

• More articles on testing from the developerWorks technical library
  A list of over 1000 articles and documents related to testing that have been published on IBM developerWorks. After linking, use the Search within these results function to narrow your search to the testing topics that interest you.
  
  

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Table of contents

• Testing guides and best practices
• Testing with Rational tools
• Additional information
• About the author
• Comments

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