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World Quality Report 2013 – 2014
CapGemini has released the 5th edition of their World Quality Report. Northway obtained a copy at the StarEast conference in Orlando. There are some interesting trends seen from the data gathered in this document.

The first observation is that the QA function continues to centralize. However, the actual number of companies that have a functional Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) is a little over 25%. Although this number is up from previous years, it’s not really something to brag about. In our ow Read Entire Entry

James Pulley Interview
Many people in the IT world know James Pulley as a thought leader regarding performance testing. We recently had a chance to catch up with James and ask him some questions about his views on the performance testing industry, as well as his involvement in the online show Perfbytes.

Northway: How did you get involved with performance testing?

James: On April 1, 1996 I joined Mercury Interactive as  pre-sales system’s engineer.   Prior to that, I had worked for several other vendors, including Microsoft a Read Entire Entry

Buzzword Bingo?
Yep, kids, it’s that time again. The HP Discover conference in Las Vegas June 10-12 is just about here. We love to have fun at the conference, and one way to do that is to lighten up a bit! Do you ever notice as you attend multiple sessions, there tends to be key words and phrases mentioned throughout the conference? These are the hot topics of the year, and many presenters like to include as many of these “buzz words” to grab the ear of as many attendees as possible.

Ever year, we put together a new list of Read Entire Entry

A Day At StarEast 2014 – 05/07/2014
Northway Solutions Group attended StarEast in Orlando today. The keynote by Randy Rice was interesting. Randy spoke about using principles before practices. Grasping the principle is more important than just jumping into practice. Without understanding principles, they tend to be misapplied.

In the general session, the topic was about “Testing in the Age of Distraction”, meaning Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and other distractions we testers face while while trying to be productive. It’s important t Read Entire Entry

Introduction to C Macros
C macros aren’t  discussed a lot by HP LoadRunner users, yet they are at the core of the C programming language used in VUGen. They can provide flexibility and power that reduces script development and maintenance times. A good example would be where a function cannot be used to encapsulate reusable code blocks because something in the code block must be known at compile time instead of at run time. In this case, there would be a global variable accessed within the code block, but the name of the variable Read Entire Entry

Community License
Probably one of the biggest changes to the product is HP’s new “Community License Bundle”. This replaces the old “Instant-on License” where HP LoadRunner would work with 10 users for a limited amount of time. This new bundle includes 50 Vusers, but it excludes Vusers for the GUI (UFT integration), COM/DCOM, and template protocols. Template protocols include C, JAVA, JavaScript, VB and VB Script, C#/C++.NET and VB .NET Vuser (Visual Studio Add-in), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), VB.NET Vuser (Visual Studi Read Entire Entry

We want to know what our readers would like to see on our blog.  We’re currently taking suggestions and ideas from our readers. Send in your suggestions by filling out the Contact Us page form. We’ll pick a winner and send them a $25 Amazon gift card, and write up an article based on their suggestion. Deadline for entries is May 18, 2014. Remember to include your correct contact information so that if you win we can get in touch with you to send you your gift. Read Entire Entry

In our last blog article, we went through setting up an Amazon AWS account for EC2, and configuring AWS and LoadRunner in preparation for using Load Generators from the Cloud. At this point, we are ready to use them in a load test scenario.

Let’s first look at using an existing machine. I installed a Micro instance of Windows 2012 Server (Standard Edition) in EC2. It’s really slow and won’t do much. HP does not recommend a Micro account, so keep in mind we’re only trying to demonstrate the features at this time. Read Entire Entry

Let’s explore using Load Generators from the Amazon EC2 Cloud in LoadRunner 12.  Many people have asked me about it, wondering about any “gotcha’s” that might be out there. I have found a couple. In this blog entry, I want to focus on the configuration and setup of LoadRunner. There is quite a bit to consider.

First, set up an account instance on Amazon EC2. I was able to set up a free account with a Micro instance of a Windows 2012 Standard machine in less than thirty minutes.  However, using the Micro instance is no Read Entire Entry

By signing up to the Northway Navigators Club, you have the option to receive emails when we posts new blog articles. We realize there may be times when you want to alter these settings, or unsubscribe from emails we send out altogether. Here is the process for that:

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