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| FA Names England Squad |
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Unfortunately, the FA website went down at least twice under the sheer load of football fans desperate to see who made the final squad. |
| Nasa image of the Frozen UK causes website unavailability |
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A stunning picture of the frozen UK appeared in numerous newspapers and websites on Thursday 7th / Friday 8th of January. BBC Radio 5 discussed the image in some detail and posted a link on their website. Listeners were soon emailing and phoning in to say the link did not exist. The huge number of people accessing the link casued the website hosting the link to fail. If you want to see the picture for yourself, follow the link.http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/?2010007-0107/GreatBritain.A2010007.1150.1km.jpgOn another weather related note, the heavy snowfalls of February 2009 casued problems for the UK Met Office. With the current bout of freezing weather, the Met Office website has performed extremely well. |
| Qantas Passengers suffer a further check-in problems January 2010 |
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New Year travellers in Australia suffered significant delays as the Amadeus based check-in system failed in similar circumstances as the November 17 failures. While the check-in application was intermittent for around an hour, queues of passengers quickly biult up causing departure delays of 3 - 4 hours in some cases. Thankfully Qantas waits for their passengers as of course delay in getting to the gate is no fault of the passenger. If this were to happen in the UK, many of the budget airlines would depart ontime but without all passengers. Certainly that is the experience I have had with Easyjet who left without a number of passengers after baggage belt problems. System failures are a fact of life. Business should take all possible steps to attempt to minimise the impact to the customer. A second failure of the Amadeus check-in application in a two month period indicates a failure to get to the bottom of problems. |
| Peter Kay Crash |
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Fans attempting to pre-register for Peter Kays forth coming tour on the peterkay.co.uk website brought it to its knees on Thursday 19th November. Apparently Peters website administrators under estimated the interest in Peters first tour in more than 5 years. |
| T-Mobile Staff Sell Personal Data |
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Yes, well, we have all had those phone calls from companies who knew our phones were about to expire, now we know how this was done for T-Mobile customers. Staff somehow obtained sufficently large quantities of personal data to make it worthwhile for other unscrupulous companies to purchase. In theory, these sorts of applications should be designed in such a way that users can only obtain customer details one at a time. It would then take forever for a single user to gather enough information to be worth selling on. This is the kind of flaw that a security test could probably pick up on. |
| Qantas Passengers Suffer delays |
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The installation of the Amadeus application used by a number of airlines including Qantas suffered an unplanned outage on Tuesday 17th November resulting in check-in staff having to revert to manual processing of passengers across New Zealand and Australia. Delays in excess of an hour were reported for most flights as a result. While Amadeus are commited to optimising performance of their applications, this is often easier said than done. |
| iMac Users suffer Poor Performance |
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iMac users have been complaining that new versions of the latest iMac is running very slowly especially when using Flash. Users suspect that there is a hardware fault causing the poor performance. Apparently the CPU utilisation is very high when playing Flash Video. While this could be a hardware fault, it is more likely to be a problem with the operating system working inefficently with large amounts of data. |
| Home Office Crime site Crashes |
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The home office released a new website yesterday (21st October) that allows a user to interactively look at crime statistics in their area. It looks like a Java application that which is highly responsive to users. The website crashed supposedly due to the large number of users on the site. Details of the crash are sketchy. Testing Performance would love to carry out an audit of the performance of the website to properly understand what was the cause of the failure and discover where our hard earned tax pounds are being misspent. |
| Press Complaints Commission website crashes |
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The Guardian reported on the 16th October that more than 1000 complaints were made to the Press complaints commission causing the website to crash.The complaints were related to the Daily Mail who had published a column on the Late Stephen Gately from the Boyzone group. The column apparently anti homosexual. Interestingly, users were urged to complain via twitter from celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Derren Brown. (Who is Derren Brown?). This is an interesting point, as regulator sites may need to consider united public action when determining the capacity and workload requirements for public facing websites. |
| Gomez swallowed by Compuware |
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Compuware are to pay $295 million for the we site optimiser called Gomez. Gomez are heavily involved with website performance and optimisation, but gosh its a lot of cash. |
| Compuware to host a free virtual Conference on Friday 15th October |
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Compuware announced that it is to host a live over the internet seminar on end to endapplication performance management on 15th October from 14:00 to 20:00 British time. ET. This is a free event titled "Reality Check: The presentation will feature industryanalysts, as well as Compuware experts who will share their experiences and bestpractices for tackling and solving application performance problems.You can register at the following address;http://ow.ly/sVpk. or alternatively, you can watch a recorded version later. Details of where to locate this will be provided later. |
| Windows 7 so much faster |
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Early installation of Windows 7 at Testing Performance have been easy and straight forward to do and have greatly speeded up the performance of a machines previously using Vista. Faster actions include opening a program, navigation of applications, in fact it seems that any action involving I/O is now much quicker. |
| Carla Bruni's website crashes |
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The Metro today reported that the Website dedicated to the French Presidents wife Carla Bruni crashed within minutes of it going live. Carla, her website developers and the ISP obviously underestimated the popularity of the French first Lady, having said that, it is probably a mistake that most people would make. |
| Student Loans in disarray |
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The Telegraph reported on Saturday 10th October how As many as 16% of students are waiting for their loan payments more than a week after courses started. Apparently first year students are the worst hit.Information released by the Student Loans Company (SLC) indicate the delay is caused by a record number of applications coupled with technical problems. A record number of applicants is hardlya surprise when there are so few jobs available for the under 25's.New scanning equipment led to a slight delay in the processing of documents and that the group then went back to manual processing of documents. A 100 million pound project to process immigration cases in 2002 was shelved by the home office just weeks before implementation because of a similar problem. It takes longer to scan the documents in than it does to put them through a photocopy. The home office at that stage estimated that they would need to double the number of case workers in order to use the new application. |
| UK broadband connections nears 18 million |
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According to OFCOM, the telecommunications regulator, the number of UK broadband connections reached 17.6 million by July 2009, up 8.4% for the year! |
| August 2009 |
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T-Plan Ltd (T-Plan), the UK based Integration and Test Management company, is pleased to announce that it has acquired VNCRobot, a test automation solution. Terms were not disclosed.This solution is highly complementary to the T-Plan Quality Solutions suite as it addresses the next logical step in the Testing Process. VNCRobot technology automates the actions of the end user, enabling highly manual elements of the testing process to be automated, dramatically reducing the regression testing cycle and replacing highly labour intensive manual activity with an efficient automated process.VNCRobot has received over 4,300 unique downloads per year from the VNCRobot site alone.As a result of this acquisition, T-Plan will benefit from: * an end to end product portfolio. Dealing with Requirements Integration into Test Management and then optimizing the testing with efficient Test Automation; * a larger combined customer base, including a significant number of blue-chip organisations; * greater penetration of the strategically important US technology market; * greater scale which will enable the enlarged company to better meet the growing demands of the combined customer base;Commenting on the acquisition, Steve Marshall, Chief Executive Officer of T-Plan, said:T-Plan sees significant value for customers and shareholders as a result of this deal. Acquiring the VNCRobot Automation business is a logical extension to our existing proposition, and we see strong growth potential in this market. With continued growth in our Quality Solutions Portfolio and a strengthening of our management team we are in a great position to quickly realise the benefits of this acquisition.Robert Pes, VNCRobot Managing Director, said:As IT projects get more and more complex, integration of a standalone testing tool into a test management framework is a logical step to achieve structured and organized approach to the whole QA process with predictable costs and results. Impressed with the T-Plan test management product line as well as the company culture, I'm pleased to bring VNCRobot to their portfolio and I am convinced that integration of our products will create a compelling proposition unmatched in the QA industry. |
| July 2009 |
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The Mail on Sunday has reported that thousands of Billy Connolly fans were left high and dry after a website crash left them unable to purchase tickets. By the time the website was back up and running, there were no tickets left. The ability to queue website requests in an orderly fashion is an absolute pre-requisite for ticket selling websites. |
| July 2009 |
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According to the Guardian, the news of Michael Jacksons premature death was too much for Twitter and a number of celebrity websites. TMZ.com which had a massive scoop on reporting the news first crashed under the enormous workload. |
| May 2009 |
MicroFocus have the announced the acquisition of Borland and the Testing and ASQ Business of Compuware. MicroFocus have not been a major player in the Application LifeCycle Mangement space this announcement is set to change all that. The following are the press releases from the relevant parties:
MicroFocus on the Compuware acquistion
MicroFocus on the Borland acquisition
Compuware
Borland
From an automated testing perspective there are obvious overlaps in the product sets with Borland Silk toolset and Compuware's QALoad, TestPartner and QADirector (and the much missed QARun). We await announcements from MicroFocus on which toolset they will focus on and hope that product development continues. From a performance testing perspective we would expect it to be SilkPerformer, which we prefer over QALoad, but who are we to say.
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| April 2009 |
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Testing Performance are experienced in testing the performance of Contact Centres / Call Centres. We have published a short aticle in our KnowledgeBase that gives a little background in this area. |
| March 2009 |
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HP presented "LoadRunner and Performance Center 9.5 Product Update" at their "HP Software Quality Management Customer Seminars". We have not published the details of the updates here as they are not finalised and therefore subject to change. You may wish to contact HP for the details. We will give our opinion on the updates once they are Generally Available. |
| March 2008 |
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Testing Performance launched tpspike.tpspike offers performance testing over the internet. tpspike will evaluate how sites or internet facing applications behave unde heavy loads. tpspike offers is a service that provides the testing software, the testing hardware, the bandwidth and the people all in one very cost effective package. |
| January 2009 |
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Testing Performance's software product, tprecon, is used to verify a major data migration project being undertaken by a large local government authority. |
| January 2009 |
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Testing performance is providing performance testing training to Apodo. |
| November 2008 |
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As strategic step to building a closer relationship with our partners Testing Performance consultants are currently undergoing technical training as a first stage in furthering a technical partnership with Facilita. |
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