TESTING TOOLS:
Optimizeit Suite 5
Borland
 Arnaud Weber, Director of Research and Development |
Programming can be like hiking through a rain forest: endless obstacles and a profusion of visible detail, some of it vital (“Snake on that branch!”) and some of it trivial (“Ooh, butterflies!”). Some tools add to the clutter, or slow you down. Borland Optimizeit Suite 5 is the other kind.
Optimizeit helps you cut through the overwhelming bloom of detail about how your program is running, helping you remove obstacles to improved performance. How?
It’s transparent. After bringing the program up, you can immediately see how the thing works, grab your application and start probing for problems in your code. There’s enough GUI candy to let you navigate, but not so much that you lose focus on the data.
It’s deep. Whether you’re interested in per-method time profiling or tracing memory usage (Profiler), or rooting out code coverage info (Code Coverage), or even debugging obscure threading problems (Thread Debugger), Optimizeit has the goods. It works nicely with stand-alone Java applications, but can also reach out and examine software running in application servers. You can attach to WebLogic, Tomcat and, of course, Borland Enterprise Server in point-and-shoot fashion; others are supported, as well. You can selectively filter out classes whose memory or timing information are just clutter. You can also export profile data to text files or Web pages to share with the rest of the team.
It’s definitely worth considering for your bushwhacking toolkit.
—Rick Wayne
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SilkTest
Segue Software’s SilkTest 6.0 is a complete end-to-end software
testing solution that allows you to automate functional testing for Web,
Java or standard GUI applications. The included 4Test language is simple,
clean and fully object-oriented: Using it and the associated macro recorder,
you can fully drive an application and note its responses. With Segue
Agent technology, you can deploy your tests across a network to test performance
under load. SilkTest supports multiple browsers and allows ODBC access
to more than 35 different databases. The Recovery System supports completely
unattended testing, and the IDE uses an AutoComplete feature to deliver
member methods and related information during test creation. —Dana Cline |
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WebQA
Did you ever want to guarantee that a piece of content, like an outdated
phone number, was not in your website? Watchfire’s WebQA 2.0 does
just that kind of checking, as well as the usual “find and replace”
across all Web pages. Complex QA requests such as “find all occurrences
of a specific image and modify the ALT text to a new value” are
another example of the tool’s sophistication. Arbitrary compliance
rules may be specified, including handicapped accessibility checks and
scripts written to automate the checking of these rules or user interface
behavior. Scripts may also be constructed by a simple “record keystroke
and play back” paradigm. As final examples of this product’s
good sense, the resulting scripts are kept in an easily edited text form,
and parameters for the scripts are stored in tables to facilitate quick
generalization of other websites. —Roland Racko |
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JProbe
JProbe is a comprehensive performance solution for tuning and optimizing
Java code. The suite contains a coverage analyst, thread analyst, debugger
and profiler. The speedy Profiler includes Call Graph, a visual representation
of the call tree and timings. The Memory Debugger monitors garbage collection
and detects memory leaks from loitering objects, and the Threadalyzer
detects thread problems, predicts deadlocks and reveals the precise problem
location in the code. Finally, Coverage pinpoints the areas of code that
haven’t been tested. To tie it all together, the included Launch
Pad provides a central location to manage all these tweaks and twiddles.
JProbe supports Windows (NT, 2000, XP) as well as Linux and several versions
of Unix. 2001 Jolt Award winner. —Dana Cline
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