The Test People love Technology. We partner in technologies we believe in and specialise in many of the latest delivery platforms. Coupled with in depth legacy knowledge and an appetite for a challenge this makes us the people to talk to when you have a problem and it seems no-one else can help. Our mantra is that if you can think it you can do, it’s just a question of whether its cost effective to do so.

Odin Axe

Odin Axe is a test automation platform that embraces best practice from both Software Engineering and Software Testing disciplines delivering the next generation of automation. The Test People (TTP) were chosen by Odin Technology to become their delivery partner due to our expertise in enterprise grade test automation, our highly skilled technical staff (with multiple tools, totally tool agnostic) and the fact that Axe facilitates TTP’s belief in better more efficient test automation.

OpenBet

OpenBet is the leading sportsbook and gaming software supplier to  the biggest names in the betting business including Ladbrokes, William Hill, Betfair, Paddy Power and SkyBet.  OpenBet also recently entered the French market with the government-backed PMU. OpenBet continues to drive product innovation through technical excellence giving its customers a powerful business advantage in a competitive marketplace.  The Test People (TTP) are Openbet specialist across all testing principles including functional, performance enginneering and automation services. The TTP team have many years Openbet experience and have recently been chosen by Openbet themselves to head up their internal test effort to provide an even better product for their growing list of major betting organisations.

Selenium

Selenium is a portable  software testing  framework for  web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language. Selenium provides a test domain specific language  (DSL) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Java,  Ruby, Groovy,  Python, PHP, and  Perl. Test playback is possible in most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on  Windows, Linux, and Macintosh  platforms. The Test People have extensive experience in creating and deploying Selenium Test Automation framework’s and their in house ‘Able’ framework harnesses the power of Java to create an extensible fast scripting environment for those (small and big business alike) who have no appetite for paying thousands of pounds for commercial tools. The TTP ‘Able’ Framework is also a highly scalable Performance testing tool for which we use Selenium as the scripting engine and Amazon EC2 as the injection platform. To date we have simulated over 40,000 users using our tool at a fraction of the cost of any other competitor in the market place.

Rich Internet Application (RIA)

Rich Internet Application (RIA) (i.e. Flex) is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered either by way of a site-specific browser, via a browser plug-in, independent sandboxes, or virtual machines. Adobe Flash, Java, and Microsoft Silverlight are currently the three most common platforms. RIAs dominate in online gaming  and trading marketplace’s as well as applications which require access to video capture. The Test People (TTP) are experts in testing RIA technology platforms. TTP have performed their full suite of services including Performance Engineering and have developed harnesses that can mimick the behaviour of these application types, so alongside our ‘Able’ browser performance tool we can load test any RIA application with little difficulty. We also have experience of automating these products suites using Selenium, RIA Test and Flex Monkey using our own best of breed automation framework, integrating into customers’ existing test practices (often improving their automation team structure and output) or on greenfield sites.

Cloud Testing/Environments

Performance testing using the cloud as an injector farm

No capital expenditure – Injector farms are expensive to purchase and either have to be scaled for the worst case load scenario (therefore massively underutilised when not executing tests) or limited budgets mean that not enough hardware can be purchased to scale up to high or maximum load (diminishing or even negating the usefulness of performance testing).  Using the cloud for an injector farm allows millions of pounds of infrastructure to be leased by the hour for the duration of the test itself.

Representative Testing of realistic Web 2.0 applications - Many websites don’t just take content from within the company’s own data centre, many companies utilise CDNs for static content delivery.   Often, internal injector farms stub or negate this connectivity – potentially masking performance issues not encountered until golive.

Real browser testing (Testing RIA applications) at scale a reality – Modern web applications are becoming ever more complex either through the use of Flash/Flex, SilverLight, JavaFX or various frameworks relying on JavaScript.  Using traditional performance testing methodologies of simulating a client’s message-level interaction with the server for these RIAs is in turn becoming more complex and potentially less representative of the behaviour of the application itself.  Test automation has met this challenge through frameworks and applications driving the actual web client and responding to changes presented to the user.  This same approach can be used with performance testing – but traditionally sized injector farms scaled to work with the lighter footprint of a simulated client cannot cope with the resources required to run a browser for each virtual user.  This is where the Cloud injector model works well, allowing 10,000s of clients to be run using the actual real browser across hundreds of virtualised servers hired only for the duration of the test.   Furthermore, as the browser moves from a traditional thin-client model to effectively a fully functional smart client application albeit deployed in a cross-platform browser plugin the performance of the browser itself can impact the user experience for the end user (one example would be where the server round trip response time is sub-second, but poorly written javascript on the page causes the response time to be seconds or even 10s of seconds in the case of some browsers.  The traditional performance test approach would miss these issues).

Cloud for Test Environments

Remove environment contention/availability/repeatability – One common challenge faced by software houses and system integrators is access to test environments and the datasets within them.  Using the cloud to build functional (and in some cases none-functional) test environments allow multiple instances of the environment to be created from a single test environment template.  A system snapshot can be created at a point prior to the tests been executed allowing a truly repeatable set of environments to be created in minutes restored from a known dataset.  This significantly reduces the headache for environment delivery teams as the system can easily be restored to a gold-standard starting point for each test.