Web Test and Load Test in VS 2005

For the last two days I explored the testing features on the VS 2005, mainly the web test and the load test features. There is still no much help provided on this test feature, but the best I could get is from the beta library http://whidbey.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp under Visual Studio Team System > Team Test.

Web Test
Now, what can we do with the web test ?
Basically VS allow us to record the steps that we do on the internet explorer and it will be able to replay it. The things that it records is the HTTP request and the query string parameters. What's the advantage of recording it ? is Automated Piloting. Combining it with load test you can simulate several users doing the same things with what you've recorded. Let's imagine a shopping site.
When we go to display all the products, clicking on a specific product to display its details, all of these steps can be recorded and be played back !

Customisation features of the Web Test :

• You can also add a pre and post request bycreating a class that inherits from the WebTestPlugin
• Add a validation
• Add a rule

That's a brief information on the web test.

Load Test

Web Test in it self won't be much meaningful, the power lies when we add the web test to a load test. You can simulate anynumber of contanst number of user or gradually increase number of user piloting the web sites just as you've recorded on the web test.

What are the things that you can customized?

• Number of users
• Portion of browser that is used by the user (for example, 45% IE 5.5, 45% IE 6 and 10% Netscape 6.0)
• Line connection that the user use (start from Modem 28.8k to high speed connection)
• and others.

What information can you pull out from the load test ? the answer is a lot!

• Server based performance counter like available memory on the server, CPU utilization, etc.
• Page based information, such as response time, etc.
• File by file information, like response time for accessing each file.
• Request information
• heaps more...

And guess what is all come with graph like in the performance counter !

I have a post on how to setup the respository for the load testing.