Posts tagged Testing
Google Testing Toggle For Search Options & Tools In Search Results
Mar 27th
Google is testing a new user interface feature for the search results where they hide the search tools and options from the left hand side and let you toggle them open and close with a click of a mouse. Michel Wester spotted this and posted a video and screen shots of how it works. Here [...]
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Paid Search Testing, March Madness Bracket Style
Mar 27th
Testing is a critical piece to success in all aspects of digital marketing. Understanding the measurement plan and goals of the test prior to testing anything is they key. If you haven’t structured your test, then you’re testing for testing sake.
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PPC Split Testing: Who, What, Why & How
Mar 7th
Your AdWords split tests should consist of four tuners: the who, what, why, and how. Start with the weightiest question of who, and then successively plan and fine tune your PPC advertising ideas with ever more precise degrees of tuning.
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Bing Testing New SERPs Design, Local Search Layouts
Mar 5th
Bing’s new search engine results page design, with the sidebar moved to the right of the page and prominent user account controls, is rolling out to more users. They’re also testing new local search results layouts and placement.
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Bing Testing New, Google-y Local Search Results
Mar 1st
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the folks at Bing Local are paying Google a very nice compliment with a new display for local search results that looks quite a bit like what Google often shows. As first spotted by BrightLocal.com, Bing’s new local search results no longer…
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Blekko Testing Search Ads
Feb 16th
MediaPost reports Blekko, the slashtags search engine, has started testing monetization efforts through search ads. Currently, the ads are provided through ad fees from Google and Bing. Blekko has yet to build out their own ad network. Rich Skrenta, Blekko founder and CEO said, “we’re…
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Facebook Advertisers Testing New Sponsored Stories Actions: Want, Own, Played & More
Feb 16th
A limited number of Facebook advertisers are testing what appears to be the next iteration of Sponsored Stories. They are targeting the social site’s users who have played video games, watched videos, or listened to songs, among other examples.
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Bing Testing New Search Results Design
Feb 8th
Bing is testing a new design for the search results layout. The new design seems a lot cleaner, fresher and more organized compared to the older design. A reader tipped us off listing out the key differences: Vertical tabs removed Top and bottom search boxes widened Search button icon changed…
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Mobile Carriers and OEMs Get Android App Testing Cloud from Apkudo
Feb 8th
When developers think of application testing, it always centers around how an app will perform on a particular device. This is especially important in the Android ecosystem that has upwards of 300 devices from a variety of original equipment manufacturers worldwide. From the inverse perspective, nobody ever thinks of the testing needs of the carriers and OEMs.
Cloud-based testing platform Apkudo thought about manufacturers and carriers with a new release of device analytics platform. Manufacturers can now test devices against the top Android apps before releasing. The idea is that if a device is tested from the supplier side, fewer handsets will be returned by consumers, potentially saving manufacturers billions of dollars.
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Apkudo tests with what it calls a “device cloud.” The configuration of more than 300 Android devices are set up in the cloud and mobile app developers can run their projects through that cloud to make sure it will work across OEMs and Android system versions.
For Apkudo’s device analytics, the opposite approach is taken. Manufacturers and network operators can test their apps against the contents of the Android Market. Apkudo will run a device against the top 200 apps in the Market to test functionality with the touchscreen, keyboard, audio, device access (accelerometer and GPS, for instance) along with performance characteristics.
This should provide developers, network operators and manufacturers with tools against Android fragmentation. As we noted last week, there is actually less fragmentation of Android devices than many think, with the optimal Android handset running on a 4.3-inch screen on version 2.3 Gingerbread. Yet, with the sheer volume of devices and applications available in the Android ecosystem, testing is still one giant headache.
Apkudo can speed up on the process that OEMs must go through to test devices. According to CEO Josh Matthews the process normally takes 6-8 weeks. Apkudo says it can do it in three days.
Device analytics will break down the results into two categories: characterization and optimization benefits. Characterization benefits help operators target competing devices while expanding their own portfolios. Imagine it as a bench mark against the rest of the ecosystem. Optimization benefits recommends how devices can be made better before release to be truly competitive in the market place.
The first U.S. carrier to sign on with Apkudo is MetroPCS. Apkudo also has agreements with “most major OEMs” in the Android ecosystem.
App developers should be happy with Apkudo’s testing abilities because it means that the OEMs could have a more efficient testing program to make sure apps work on their devices. When it comes to app functionality on Android, developers need to work the manufacturers and carriers to ensure a quality experience. The end of fragmentation, after all, is a two way street.
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HP Aims to Redefine Apps Performance Testing with Cloud Platform
Feb 7th
When mobile users feel they don’t like how their apps perform after the first trial, some 75% of them won’t launch the app again. That’s the metric cited by engineers and marketers at HP Software, who note that this first wave of mobile apps brought forth by the iPhone has resulted in a glut of programs that make even the best performing mobile hardware into a pocket full of silicon cement.
This morning, HP begins a repurposing of the performance testing tools for Web sites that it gained through the Mercury Interactive acquisition of 2006, for the mobile apps era. It’s unveiling what it calls “LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud,” complete with hyphens. It will act as an off-premise testing platform for mobile apps that are deployed as services, simulating the activity generated by thousands of users simultaneously to gauge the resilience of servers and resources. This way, you might not have to disappoint three-fourths of them to learn how well your service holds up.
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Better scalability through experimentation
“The application architecture itself is the performance bottleneck nine out of ten times,” says Matt Morgan, HP Software’s global senior director of solutions marketing, in an interview with RWW. “By monitoring these services and knowing how long a transaction spends waiting for a data retrieval or a logic process, or some other storage function to occur, you can pinpoint the modules inside the service that have the most potential to slow an application under load. You can find out which services are not scaling.”
When applications are deployed on PaaS platforms such as Heroku and Windows Azure, Morgan says, a great deal of the complexity of how the software interfaces with the hardware is abstracted into obscurity. The architectural concept that I dubbed composite applications in 1991 has expanded to a seemingly unmanageable number of tiers. With the shift to mobile architecture, much of the burden of providing performance has shifted off of the front-end client, and onto the server. And in-between those two tiers are any number of platforms. “So this idea that the software is a composition, gets even more complicated,” he remarks.
“We correlate the front-end story to the back-end problem. And if you think about just the complexities of performance monitoring, if you don’t do correlation, you can end up with an enormous collection of logs and metrics that don’t actually mean anything to the tester,” he continues. “The tester really cares about, how many users can the system support, and what will these users experience when they do concurrently hit their system?”
Mobile apps typically break at some point, and Morgan notes, they don’t bend very much before they do. Maybe an app performs well with 300 simultaneous users, and then fails completely at 325. So LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud (hereafter LRC) finds the breaking point, which is typically somewhere. Once that’s done, it relies upon feedback provided by a vast network of back-end monitors, probing such factors as SQL queries, server metrics, and diagnoses of the method calls being invoked inside the service. “By correlating how much time it takes for a transaction to hit these things, you can actually attain a pretty clear picture, and start to show that the areas of your application that are causing problems have a distinct performance impact.”
The protocol HP uses for emulating user activity in AJAX Web applications, called TruClient, is explained in this video. TruClient has been extended for LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud.
Identifying your app by how and where it breaks
The result is a kind of “stress footprint” that characterizes the resilience state of your mobile app. The space in which this footprint appears is the scenario, which is LRC’s term for a repeatable test. Each test helps establish a firm baseline, which is then replicated identically for different problem sets – different numbers of users. This way you’re testing how the same code scales up, including with each increment – LRC adds test users on an incremental scale, not logarithmic. “You’re trying to determine, if the exact same actions take place on the server, do things improve with the change?” says the HP senior director. “Scenarios allow you to digitize that load, creating a one-click re-execution capability, which is very important in an iterative world. You run your load test, you identify your problem, you make your change, and you go back to your scenario and run the exact same test.”
Overlaying the results gives you your best metric as to performance, which in a cloud-based scenario is indeed capable of improving with incrementally added users.
Results from previous load tests, including with earlier builds of your apps, are recorded as snapshots. New test results can be overlaid atop these earlier ones, in order to determine what code changes made the biggest impact. “We give you the capability to leverage that information inside of an operational monitoring solution, but if you wanted to monitor a Web or mobile app going forward for functionality, and you want to have visibility to the way it should run, you can use the metrics from LoadRunner to compare against what it’s actually doing in production. That gives you the snapshot of the lab world, where everything works, to the production world where everything’s real.”
LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud is being offered now to HP partners in the U.S. and Canada, and will be rolled out through OEM partners on their own timetables. Pricing will be determined by the party making the sale.
No, no, not that Lode Runner! Somebody get our graphics department off the Apple II and replace this!
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