Month: June 2014

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Plagiarism
Plagiarism

I’ve heard this phrase before, but it’s never applied to me until now. This afternoon I was searching for a snippet of LoadRunner information when I came across a LoadRunner blog that I hadn’t seen before. I read a couple of articles when one in particular caught my eye. The website http://easyloadrunner.blogspot.co.uk by Raviteja Gorentla had one article in particular that interested me.

Article 1
The article “New Release of LoadRunner 12 version” describes in detail how the author met HP at the Discover conference in Barcelona and worked with them on the beta evaluation before it was released. This all sounded very familiar, so I looked at my own article, “First Look at LoadRunner 12” on the Trust IV blog. The text was identical. The plagiarist hadn’t even had the decency to cite the original author (me) or include a link to the Trust IV website.

Article 2
I did a quick trawl of the plagiarist’s website and found numerous other articles, some of which seemed familiar. For example “How to use JavaScript in your HP LoadRunner scripts” is a straight copy of Malcolm Isaac’s article from the HP LoadRunner and Performance Center blog.

Article 3
I looked a little further and the article “Sequential Random Unique Each iteration, Each occurrence in Load Runner” was taken from Sindu Bindu’s website and the article entitled “LOADRUNNER VUGEN PARAMETERIZATION” (http://www.sindubindu.com/2012/04/loadrunner-vugen-parameterization.html – Link no longer available). Even the images were taken from the original article because the screenshots showed a distinctive purple colour on the task bar.

Article 4
The next page that I looked at was “Action files in LoadRunner”, a very short article, describing the purpose of the three commonly used sections in a LoadRunner script. This also looked as if it had been copied from Sindu Bindu’s website. “Action files in Loadrunner” (http://www.sindubindu.com/2012/03/action-files-in-loadrunner.html – Link no longer available).  This same content was also duplicated on three separate scribd pages.

So far all the articles that I’d seen had been taken from other people’s websites. No original source or author was ever cited, but Raviteja had thoughtfully put a copyright statement at the bottom of his pages to protect ‘his’ content from people like him.

Sadly Raviteja’s efforts were in vain. Three other “copy cats” appeared to have reproduced his content on their scribd pages. The “Action Files in LoadRunner” document is also reproduced in:

So now you know why it’s so hard to “Google” for the correct answer to a performance testing problem. Unscrupulous testers are ripping off other people’s content and passing it off as their own. Next time you hire a big offshore provider, try to make sure that you don’t get Ravita, Janede, Sai or Ilaaaannnn working for you. I’m not sure that they know what they’re doing.

Valid UK address data for testing

Mark Tomlinson (@Mtomlins) recently contacted me via Skype and asked me whether I had source of test data for valid UK addresses and postcodes. In the past I’ve used Brian Dunning’s sample data, and initially I recommended this to Mark. The data appears to be valid, but is actually made up of real first and last names, together with randomised street addresses which do not represent actual locations. This made me wonder what would be a good source of valid addresses for testing.

There are various options available to performance testers, including cuts of production data (suitably anonymised) or the Royal Mail address database. I did a couple of Google searches and stumbled across an excellent site run by Chris Bell, a developer who specialises in .NET, PHP and Google Maps integration.

Random Address Generator – from Chris Bell’s website

Chris has a random address generator on his website, you simply enter the number of addresses you require and decide whether you want them comma separated or not, then click a button to create the addresses. As the addresses are created by are plotted on a Google map which demonstrates that they are valid and once the list is complete, you can download it to a text file on your computer.

Chris has some other great code samples on his site including code which converts postcodes to latitude and longitude (and vice versa), lists UK phone dialling codes geographically and has sources of data such as postcodes by parliamentary constituency and even property sales.

PostCodes by Parliamentary Constituency
PostCodes by Parliamentary Constituency – from Chris Bell’s website

This is a fantastic source of data for any tester or even somebody who’s just a bit nosey and wants to know how much their neighbour’s house is worth!  😉