Olaf Heimburger's Blog

Not necessarily part of the ADF in Action series, but we will see later how we can leverage the input from this book later...

Testing: The Missing Project Task

For many, testing is one of the most tedious and time consuming parts of software development. This is true and in many projects this will be the first victim to get more buffer time for the overdue development tasks. Any attempt to make it more comfortable and repeatable helps, to keep this task back on the project plan.

Apache JMeter: One of the Many Tools for the Trade

There are a number of tools, open-source, free, and commercial ones, available on the market to help each of us to lower the pain and reducing the time and need for manual testing. Apache JMeter is one of my all-time favourites and also an open-source and free tool. I have seen it in use in many projects, set to action by more or less skilled team members. Its usages are from load to functional testing during the developer and the user-acceptance tests also. JMeter's extensible architecture easily allows it to adopt recent trends in development and makes it even useful for Service-Oriented Architecture  that are implemented around SOAP, JMS, and HTTP.

The Author

Emily H. Halili works as a quality-assurance engineer in Malaysia and has a lot of hands-on experiences to guide the reader into the usefulness of testing in general and Apache JMeter in particular.

The Book

When I first had the book in my hands, I was a bit disappointed because I am used to those hefty 500+ page monsters that keep me awake for hours and days. This 140 pages and 8 chapters beauty is a very handy book for Apache JMeter beginners and for me to carry around. It is about the right amount of text and topics to get started with the topics of load testing and functional testing.

But before you can get your hands dirty with Apache JMeter, a short introductary chapter how automated testing pays off. This valuable chapter, at least when your project managers wants to cut the testing time again, is followed by a quick introduction to JMeter with all the tool specific concepts like Test Plan, ThreadGroup, Listeners, Controllers, Timers, Assertions, and Configuration Elements. As an experienced developer you might be able to install JMeter quickly, but for the beginner Chapter 3 Installing Apache JMeter is a quick and short one.

Having finished these three chapters, you are ready for prime time. Chapter 4, The Test Plan shows you all the parts of JMeter test plan. This is by far the most important chapter of the book. It sets the scene for the following chapters by explaining all parts of a good test plan and how they interact together. In Chapter 5, Load/Performance Testing of Websites you learn how to do a load test efficiently and how to avoid penalties for Denial of Service attacks while testing. In the Functional Testing chapter you get ideas what parts are needed and how to combine them for the formal tests.

If you think these three chapters are helpful for your next testing assignments you should also consider the Advanced Features chapter which tells you how to extend the Web test by using loops or how to reference variables from the configuration steps, as well as testing a Database or an FTP server.

Overall Impressions

The book is an easy read and you can do it in your lunch break or in the first few hours of your testing assignment. It is a perfect companion book for a pretty useful tool and a nice introduction for every Apache JMeter beginner. I wish this book was available years before I started to use JMeter. With the first chapter it should be on the desk of every test or quality assurance engineer. Personally I can not wait for the sequel: Apache JMeter: Advanced Techniques.

Book Details

Emily H. Halili
Apache JMeter
ISBN 978-1-847192-95-0
Packt Publishing