Testing – Page 4 – bish.co.uk

Come on Asda, sort your website out or face losing market share….

My wife is a regular online shopper and is a little more tech savvy than the average shopper. She’s heard me “banging on” about website performance for long enough that she knows that when one browser doesn’t work she should try another, or use a different PC (as a geek household we have several!)

We’ve used Asda’s Click and Collect service since it started in our area and have used their Home Delivery service for several years. Over recent weeks, my wife has been complaining that their website seems slow; she’s experienced several browser crashes when adding items to orders and is becoming generally dissatisfied with the website’s performance. She described this to a delivery driver recently and he mentioned the fact that deliveries were “quieter than normal”.

My wife told me that the Asda website had performed poorly with Chrome, IE and Firefox browsers on her Windows 7 PC. I confirmed the same behaviour on my PC. Rather than adding additional items to the order I gave up and basically decided that we’d accept whatever was delivered. My wife persevered and finally managed to amend the order late last night on an iPad using the Safari browser. (She’s very persistent) 🙂

This morning, I decided to take a closer look at the Asda website. I installed DynaTrace AJAX Edition on my PC and monitored my IE browser as I logged into the Asda website. I wasn’t surprised to see poor performance in client-side code.

The home page and the groceries pages both respond in a few seconds, but when I logged in and clicked on the page showing my favourite items (i.e. those that we order most frequently), the page took 9.5 seconds to appear in my browser. The bulk of this time was spent executing client-side JavaScript (shown in orange in the image below).

I’m not testing the Asda website, but if I was… I’d start performance testing whilst simultaneously using APM tools like DynaTrace, HP Diagnostics or Introscope; this way I could give detailed feedback to the developers. I’d also want to use performance test tools that are capable of executing client-side code such as LoadRunner, SilkPerformer, SOASTA CloudTest or NeoLoad. This is preferable to using low-cost/no-cost HTTP-only tools like The Grinder or JMeter.

Now I’m not a developer, but if I was…
I’d be paying particular attention to the following functions:
function navigateToFavouritesListsPage (Total execution time – 11.8 seconds)
function getPCookieName (This was called twice and took 3.5 seconds)

For Asda’s sake and that of the delivery driver who is reporting deliveries being “quieter than normal”, I hope that they sort this out soon. My wife for one would be grateful.

Evian’s “Baby and Me app” performs like a geriatric…..

According to the Danone website, “Baby & Me, created by BETC, shows a street full of people rediscovering their inner youth – and dance moves – as their reflections reveal the baby versions of their adult selves.” If you haven’t seen the advert, you should watch “Baby & Me” on YouTube, it’s fantastic; a perfect example of a viral marketing campaign with over 59 million YouTube views. This advert builds on the success of their “Roller Babies” campaign from a few years ago (69 million views). I’ve shown it to my children and my wife and everybody I’ve mentioned it to seems to have seen it. Evian is reaching a mass market with relatively little TV advertising spend.

To capitalise on the success of the advert, Evian has commissioned the production of a “Baby and Me” app for iOS and Android. On the face of it, this looks like a great idea. The application takes a picture of you as an adult and then uses pattern matching to identify over 70 facial features in a database of baby pictures. The application then creates a composite image of you as a baby. This has great potential for social sharing of images and it isn’t hard to see how this could help to ensure that even more people get the “Release the inner you” message from Evian.

There is no doubt that viral media is a great marketing tool and mobile apps are a great way to use peer interaction and socialisation to spread a message quickly. All good news so far from a marketing / PR perspective, but…….

…….There’s always a “BUT” isn’t there?

The Evian app is sadly disappointing.
Anybody who downloads an app that doesn’t work first time is highly likely to delete it and never use it again. Negative publicity from colleagues and friends who can’t use the app will do a great deal to damage any positive marketing messages that the app was intended to create

It is highly likely that the application designers and developers have been forced to work to a difficult schedule to get this application to market. Whilst individual teams may have all tested their application components; it is highly likely that proper end-to-end testing, including testing over relatively slow 3G and Wifi networks has not been done. Performance testing is crucial for applications like this, a poor user experience will result in users abandoning the application and never downloading it again.

So what went wrong?
Whilst performance testing is a well-established profession……
…testers need to evolve.

15 years ago testers needed to understand thick clients and complex client-server apps.
10 years ago, web applications dominated the market and testers skills (and pay rates) started to fall.
5 years ago, Web 2.0 and mobile technologies started to develop and many testers failed to understand the complexity of more complex multi-tier web applications.
Now testers need the ability, skills and tools to test across multiple devices and multiple networks and need a deep understanding of application architecture to ensure application stability, scalability and performance under load.

Many testers don’t have the required skills or testing tools to test complex multi-tier applications across different devices and network topologies. Evian have used big-hitting media companies, BETC Digital and B-Reel, to develop their application…. I bet they’re wishing that they had the application tested properly by an independent testing specialist before this week!

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HP Discover – Las Vegas 2013

My followers on Twitter and LinkedIn will already be aware that I went to the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas last week. They’ll have heard tales of lost baggage, extreme “jet-lag induced tiredness” (body-clock waking me at 3:30 every morning) as well as various updates from the conference.

People go to the conference for a variety of reasons; to hear the keynote speeches, attend NDA sessions, see application demonstrations or to meet HP product managers,R&D teams or other experts. I’ve been part of Vivit for over 4 years now and before that I was a member of the Mercury software user group. For me the highlight of my conference was meeting up with a group of fellow testers one evening over a glass or two of whisky (thanks Mr Moore)

Left to Right. Wilson Mar, Scott Hysmith, James Pulley, Richard Bishop, Scott Moore

These testers have inspired me from my first days as a tester when I used to frequent Wilson Mar’s website and Scott Moore’s loadtester.com. I knew James Pulley through his moderation of Google, Yahoo and StackOverflow LoadRunner groups and more recently I’ve been listening to James Pulley and Mark Tomlinson’s PerfBytes podcasts.

I sincerely hope that this becomes a regular event at conferences. It was great to finally meet these people face to face and “put the testing world to rights” 🙂