What are the modules of Quality Center?

The Quality Center modules are:

Management Module: This module includes following sub modules:

1. Release module: Enable us to define release and cycles for the application management process.
2. Libraries module: Enables us to define libraries to track changes in project, reuse entities in project, or share entities across multiple projects.

Requirement Module: Helps us to manage requirements. This includes defining what we are testing, defining requirement topics and items, also analyzing requirements.

Test Plan: Enable us to develop and manage test in a hierarchical tree-structure. Tests can be linked to requirement and defects.

Test Resources: Enables us to manage test resources in a hierarchical tree structure. Tests resources can be associated with tests.

Test lab: Enables us to run tests and analyze the results.

Defect Module: Helps us to report defects, determine, repair priorities and reopen defects.

Dashboard: Helps to create graphs, reports and excel reports.

What is Quality Center?

HP Quality Center is Web based Test Management tool. We can access Quality Center over the internet or intranet, via a Web browser. It involves interrelated steps such as defining release, developing requirement, designing and execution of tests, monitoring and reporting defects. Quality Center simplifies and organizes application management by giving us systematic control over the process. It helps in creating framework and foundation for application management workflow. Quality center features a system for organizing and tracking application release, enabling us to align business priorities and quality expectation with our project’s requirement, test and defects.

What is the testing lifecycle?

There is no standard testing life cycle, but it is consist of following phases:

- Test Planning (Test Strategy, Test Plan, Test Bed Creation)
- Test Development (Test Procedures, Test Scenarios, Test Cases)
- Test Execution
- Result Analysis (compare Expected to Actual results)
- Defect Tracking
- Reporting

What are the automated Performance testing phases?

The phases involved in automated performance testing are:

Planning/Design: This is the primary phase where team will be gathering the requirements of the performance testing. Requirements can be Business, Technical, System and Team requirements.

Build: This phase consists of automating the requirements collected during the design phase.

Execution: it is done in multiple phases. It consists of various types of testing like baseline, benchmarking testing

Analyzing and tuning: During the performance testing we will be capturing all the details related to the system like Response time and System Resources for identifying the major bottlenecks of the system. After the bottlenecks are identified we have to tune the system to improve the overall performance.

What activities are performed during performance testing of any application?

Following activities are performed during testing of application:

1. Create user scenarios
2. User Distribution
3. Scripting
4. Dry run of the application
5. Running load test and analyzing the result

What are the exiting and entering criteria in the performance testing?

We can start the performance testing of application during the design. After the execution of the performance testing, we collected the results and analyzed them to improve the performance. The performance tuning processed will be performed throughout the application development life cycle. Performance tuning is performed which is based on factors like release time of application and user requirements of application stability, reliability and scalability under load, stress and performance tolerance criteria. In some projects the end criteria is defined based on the client performance requirements defined for each section of the application. When product reaches to the expected level then that can be considered as the end criteria for performance testing.

What is the reason behind performing automated load testing?

Following drawbacks of manual Load Testing that leads to Automation load testing:

- Difficult to measure the performance of the application accurately.
- Difficult to do synchronization between the users.
- Number of real time users are required to involve in Performance Testing
- Difficult to analyze and identify the results & bottlenecks.
- Increases the infrastructure cost

What is concurrent user hits in load testing?

When the multiple users, without any time difference, hits on a same event of the application under the load test is called a concurrent user hit. The concurrency point is added so that multiple Virtual User can work on a single event of the application. By adding concurrency point, the virtual users will wait for the other Virtual users which are running the scripts, if they reach early. When all the users reached to the concurrency point, only then they start hitting the requests.

What is performance tuning?

To improve the system performance we follow a mechanism, known as Performance tuning. To improve the systems performance there are two types of tuning performed:

Hardware tuning: Optimizing, adding or replacing the hardware components of the system and changes in the infrastructure level to improve the systems performance is called hardware tuning.

Software tuning: Identifying the software level bottlenecks by profiling the code, database etc. Fine tuning or modifying the software to fix the bottlenecks is called software tuning.

what are the laungages supported by load runner?

Following languages are supported by LoadRunner:
1. C Language
2. Visual Basic Scripting
3. Visual Basic For Applications
4.  Java Scripting

For what purpose, User will be using ‘continue on’ error?

Continue on should be set only when making Execution Logs more descriptive or adding logic to the Vuser.

What are all the reasons to use the Server Resources Monitor?

Server resources monitor is used to find how much data is coming from Cache and helps to find out what are all the parts of the system have bottlenecks

What is difference between Manual scenario and Goal oriented scenario?

Following are the differences between Manual and Goal Oriented scenario:

Manual Scenario	Goal Scenario
Main purpose is to learn how many Vusers can run concurrently	Goal may be throughput, response time, or number of concurrent Vusers
Gives you manual control over how many Vusers run and at what time	Load Runner manages Vusers automatically

What tools are required to analyze Vuser run results?

Following tools are required to analyze Vuser run results:

• Execution Log
• Run-Time Viewer and
• Mercury Test Results window

What should be done to view parameter substitution in the Execution Log?

Parameter substitution can be viewed in the extended log in the Run time settings.

What are the four selection methods when choosing data from a data file?

Following are the four selection methods:

• Sequential
• Random
• Unique
• Parameter name

How can we find database related issues?

Monitors and the Data Resource Graph can be used to find database related issues. LoadRunner allow the tester to specify the resource that needs to be measured before the controller is run.

What is remote command launcher?

The remote command launcher enables the controller to start applications in the host machine.

What are the Load Runner testing process?

Following are the testing process in LoadRunner:

• Plan load test
• Create Vuser Scripts
• Define Scenario
• Run Scenario
• Analyze results

What is the difference betweeen standard log and ectended log?

The Standard log sends a subset of functions and messages sent during script execution to the log. The subset depends on the vuser type.Extended log sends a detailed script execution messages to the output log.This is the mainly used during debugging when we want information about: parameter substitution, data returned by the server, advanced trace.

How do you debug a LoadRunner script?

 VuGen contains two options to help debug Vuser scripts-the Run Step by Step command and breakpoints. The Debug settings in the Options dialog box allow us to determine the extent of the trace to be performed during scenario execution. The debug information is written to the Output window. We can manually set the message class within your script using the lr_set_debug_message function. This is useful if we want to receive debug information about a small section of the script only.

Explain Error handling in LoadRunner.

We can specify how a Vuser handles errors during script execution. By default, when a Vuser detects an error, it exits. A run-time setting is used to instruct a Vuser to complete the execution of the test script when an error occurs while executing the script.

- To do this, select the Continue on Error check box in the Miscellaneous run-time settings.
- Instruct VuGen to complete all execution in where an lr_error_message function was invoked, as Failed.
- The lr_error_message function is invoked by a programmed “If statement”, when a certain condition is met.

What is wasted time in VuGen Replay log?

 Waste time is never performed by any browser user and just the time spent on the activities which support the test analysis. These activities are related to logging, keeping record and custom analysis.

How is VuGen script modified after recording?

 Once the script is recorded, it can be modified with the following process:
Transaction
Parameterization
Correlation
Variable declarations
Rendezvous Point
Validations/Check point

What are the reasons why parameterization is necessary when load testing the Web server and the database server?

parameterization is like script varibles.It is used to vary input to  the server and to emulate real users.Different set of data are sent to the server each time the script is run.one script can emulate many different users on the system. 

what is the use of Scheduler?

we can use the load runner scheduler to set up a scenario to run automatically.

How many areas we can do the correlation?

Areas of correlation are:

1)Iteam Data
2)Time Stamp
3)Links
4)Check Boxes
5)Radio Buttons
6)List Buttons

You want to have each step in your script measured as a transaction in the Controller and not shown in the Replay Log in VuGen. How can you accomplish this?

This can be done by enabling  the automatic transaction in the Run-time settings

You have created several Auto Correlation rules. A new tester on your team is preparing to record a group of scripts on the same application on his workstation. What can you do to provide the tester with the correlation rules?

I would  export the Auto Correlation rules to a .cor file, and then have the new team member import the .cor file into his Auto Correlation rules

What would be your recommendation to improve performance measure?

Fine Tuning of network, database, and app and web server is recommended.

At the network level try to optimize the latency and bandwidth.

At database level, verify all indexes and sequences by running profilers. You may also optimize your database queries.

At the App server level, run profilers for finding the memory leaks in the application

At the web server level you can use monitors and optimize the throughput and other related metrics of the server.

What are the types of check points is available in LoadRunner?

Loadrunner provides two types of check points

a) Image Checkpoints : This checkpoint will verify the presence of an image on a page during run-time

b) Text Checkpoint : This checkpoint will verify the presence of a text-string on a page during run-time

Both of the above checkpoints can be added in Vugen.

How will you divide your script into multiple Actions? Why?

I will divide the script into Actions based on the functionality. For example, Once Action for Logining into Application, another Action for booking and so on.

Actions increase code reusability, reduce maintenance time and hence, decrease costs.

What is the difference in running the Vuser as a process and as a thread? Which is more advantageous way of running Vuser?

When Vuser is run as a process the same driver program is loaded into memory for each Vuser. This will take a large amount of memory and will limit the number of Vusers you can run on a single generator

When Vuser is run as a thread, only one instance of driver program is shared by given number of Vusers.  You can run more number of Vusers on a single generator using the multi-threading mode.

How did you find web server related issues?

Using Web resource monitors we can find the performance of web servers. Using these monitors we can analyze throughput on the web server, number of hits per second that occurred during scenario, the number of http responses per second, the number of downloaded pages per second.

If web server, database and Network are all fine where could be the problem?

The problem could be in the system itself or in the application server or in the code written for the application.