- Needed: Rapid Feedback on Environmental Performance
- Simple Solution to a Complex Problem
- Implementing the Solution in a Simple Automation Script
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Simple Solution to a Complex Problem
The following example was written for the open-source testing tool WATIR (pronounced water), short for Web Application Testing in Ruby. This article was written using version 1.0.1.
For a sample application, we'll look at Bookpool.com. This is a great intuitive example of an everyday e-commerce web site.
Let's begin by looking at the finished product and work our way backward from there. Figure 1 shows a sample of the spreadsheet that we used to debug the deployment environment and eventually sent to management.
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Let's break this apart and look at each piece in isolation:
- Columns A, B, and C represent deployment environment, application page (or function), and time in seconds, respectively.
- Pages and functions are formatted to be hidden using the +/- buttons on the left.
- Each page or function contains a subtotal for the function, showing the average time (in seconds) for that page/function, as shown in Figure 2.
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- If you expand a page/function, you can see all of the actual data that was collected for that page or function (see Figure 3).
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- The average time (in seconds) for all pages and functions for the environment is then listed, as shown in Figure 4.
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It's fairly simple. At the lowest level is always an average. If you want to display the source of that data, click the expand (+) button. We typically sent this information to management on a weekly basis. Our average spreadsheet would have around 2,200 rows of data and contain information on no less then five deployment environments.