Blog

During the HP Discover 2012 Conference (June 4 – 7), Northway Solutions Group will be blogging live from Las Vegas. Check this page often during that time for frequent updates.
06/03/12
Northway employees are arriving today. Going to get a jump on registration by getting there early. No long lines, and plenty of people to help:

I received a personal escort to the speaker check-in. I noticed the theme of the conference this year:

There’s video cameras getting ready to shoot some video during Read Entire Entry

The HP Discover conference is June 4-7, 2012 in Las Vegas, and that means it is time for the HP Discover Business Buzzword Bingo game! Like many who attend HP Discover, we have noticed that there is a pattern of catch phrases and marketing/product terms that seem to form a theme or a motif as the presentations proceed. Sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming, and starts sounding like a new language altogether. This is a lighthearted way to poke a bit of fun at IT and ourselves as we feast on all the new terminology we’re exposed to over Read Entire Entry

In October 2010, Loadtester Incorporated merged companies with Advanced QA. Both of these companies were HP Partners and Resellers, and had been all the way back to the Mercury Interactive days of 2004. Upon merging, the decision was made to take both companies and make them subsidiaries of the resulting company – and Northway Solutions Group was born.

For the last several months, Northway has been working diligently to migrate the information contained on the Loadtester.com web site into the NorthwaySolutions.com web site. W Read Entire Entry

In a previous blog, I reviewed Virtual Table Server and its history with LoadRunner. I wrote about many of my friends in the testing community who have contributed to it, talked about it, and used it in practice. Today, I want to introduce you to ANOTHER one of my longtime friends, Ed Leno of Solution Maniacs. Ed is one of the most talented performance engineers and consultants that I have had the privilege of working with over the years. He has decided to create a new utility application called SQUID (Simple Queues of Independent Read Entire Entry

I’ve been doing some research on “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD), which seems to be a new trendy thing to do. It’s pretty interesting to see how companies are dealing with the consumerization of IT, because it is shifting the entire IT culture right before our eyes.

Users (not IT professionals) are getting the latest technologies and gadgets first. It makes sense that they want to bring them to work and continue to use them. According to this 2011 survey by Good Technology, workers are willing to bear cost of the devices (as w Read Entire Entry

For many long-time users of LoadRunner, Virtual Table Server (VTS) has been an unsupported tool that many of us have relied upon to solve dynamic data dependency issues under load. VTS is a virtual data file that multiple load generators can reference to create, modify, and consume data Think of it as a “living” data file (or table) that runs in memory. The load generators can get values from a single pool of data on the fly. One Vuser can create new data, and any other Vusers can immediately consume it. I’m not sure who originally Read Entire Entry

For the past few months, I’ve been presenting on planning for the perfect storm  for realistic, but worst case situations and how to properly scope application performance testing projects based on some best practices I have learned over the years. I’m always looking for new material. Last week, I got some.  On Friday (5/18/12), the whole world watched as Facebook finally had their IPO, and LOTS of people wanted to buy shares – but couldn’t. A “software glitch” was the culprit. Did you ever notice, it is always called a “glitch”? Read Entire Entry

At the STAR EAST conference this year, mobile solutions saturated the vendor exhibition area. It’s no wonder that mobile application testing is the hot in the testing community right now. Testers are now faced with the task of testing mobile versions of their applications and figuring out how to adapt to the new paradigm (and challenges) mobile applications bring. It’s not as if they didn’t have enough to test already, right?

After listening to some of the conversations around mobile and seeing some interesting questions be Read Entire Entry

One “feature” in HP’s Application Lifecycle  Management (ALM) and Quality Center relating to the Defects module is the ability to add multiple defects without ever closing the “New Defect” window, and to resume populating a new defect after the “Close” button is clicked. When the user clicks the “Close” button and then “New Defect”, the field values are cached. This can be a great time saver; however, it is not without its unintended consequences. This means that the Bug_New event is not triggered when clicking the “New Defect” Read Entire Entry

The Northway team be in Vegas at HP Discover June 4 – 7, 2012. We will be speaking this year on “Application Transformation in Healthcare IT” with our client, BlueCross BlueSheild of Tennessee. Our session number is TB2224. You can find us on the HP Discover 2012 Session Catalog page. Here is more information about session:

In 2011, Blue Cross Blue Shield Tennessee (BCBST) decided to implement HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM), Quality Center, Functional Testing, and LoadRunner—all at the same time. In this presentation, Read Entire Entry