Re: Wisdom on how to build a "stressful simulation test" with Selenium & POE

A while back, I experimented with a somewhat similar idea using Genetic Algorithms. I took the basic ideas from:

http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/papers/Kasik/djk_txt.htm

In the end, I found that it was way to slow to generate useful test results without building a small supercomputer cluster to massively parallelize the problem. If it was just a static HTML site, you might be able to do it, but handling JavaScript greatly increases the memory requirements.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

Comment on Re: Wisdom on how to build a "stressful simulation test" with Selenium & POE

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Re^2: Wisdom on how to build a "stressful simulation test" with Selenium & POE by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Jul 16, 2011 at 11:51 UTC
With all due respect, sir or madame ... “huh?”
Re^3: Wisdom on how to build a "stressful simulation test" with Selenium & POE by hardburn (Abbot) on Jul 16, 2011 at 20:31 UTC
The approach is that you parse out all the possible actions on a page (links, forms, etc.), numbering them in order. The genetic part is just an array of numbers, with each entry being the number of the action to take on that page. Give it a goal to reach (like "put an item in the cart"), and pick the ones that reach that the best goal (by some measure of "best") and throw out the rest. I didn't get too far with some of the details (like how to handle complex forms), but it was already clear that you couldn't do it with just a moderately powerful workstation. It might work for stress tests rather than functional test. If you're unfamiliar with genetic algorithms, don't worry, they're easy. Here's a good intro: A Beginning Guide To Evolutionary Algorithms "There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.	[reply]