Software Testing and Automation

1. The Importance of Scalability & Load Testing Some very high profile websites have suffered from serious outages and/or performance issues due to the number of people hitting their website. E-commerce sites that spent heavily on advertising but not nearly enough on ensuring the quality or reliability of their service have ended up with poor web-site performance, system downtime and/or serious errors, with the predictable result that customers are being lost. In the case of toysrus.com, its web site couldn't handle the approximately 1000 percent increase in traffic that their advertising campaign generated. Similarly, Encyclopaedia Britannica was unable to keep up with the amount of users during the immediate weeks following their promotion of free access to its online database. The truth is, these problems could probably have been prevented, had adequate load testing taken place. When creating an eCommerce portal, companies will want to know whether their infra...

Often the severity of a software defect can vary even though the software never changes.  The reason being is that a software defect's severity depends on the system in which it runs. For example, the severity of the Pentium's floating-point defect changes from system to system.  On some systems, the severity is small; whereas on other systems, the severity is high.  Another problem (which occurs regularly) is that the definitions of the severity levels (or categories) themselves change depending on the type of system.  For example, a catastrophic defect in a nuclear system means that the fault can result in death or environmental harm; a catastrophic defect in a database system means that the fault can (or did) cause the loss of valuable data.  Therefore, the system itself determines the severity of a defect based on the context for which the defect applies.  The context makes all the difference in how to classify a defect's severity.  I have attach...