Thursday 30 April 2020

What is the "concurrent floating license"?

With Traffic Parrot (TP) floating licensing, a limited number of licenses are shared among a larger number of users or environments over time.

An instance is a process that may run on a server or a laptop. Every instance you want to run in parallel (simultaneously) needs a license. See the diagram below for an example.

When an authorized user or environment wishes to run the application, they request a license from a central license server. The license server allows the application to run if a license is available. When they finish using the application or when the allowed license period expires, the license is reclaimed by the license server and made available to other authorized users or environments or build agents.

Let us say you are running the following configuration:
  • TP installed on 10 Jenkins Slaves (TeamCity build agents, etc) but at most 3 of them use TP at the same time
  • 1 TP instance installed and used in the performance testing environment where the tests are run overnight
  • 1 TP instance installed and used in the system testing environment where the tests are run during the day
In this case, you use only 4 instances of Traffic Parrot running inside the organization at the same time.
It means you need to purchase 4 floating licenses.

To help us determine how many licenses you might need, please answer these questions:
  • How many environments will you have where the TP will be running for long periods of time (QA, SIT, ...), please include protocols per environment?
  • How many performance environments will you have where the TP will be running?
  • How many build/pipeline runners (e.g. Jenkins slaves, TeamCity agents, ...) do you have?
  • How many developers and/or testers would use Traffic parrot on their laptops/desktops/VMs?
  • How many services and APIs would you like to virtualize, please specify protocols and number of services (i.e. 120 HTTP, 3 IBM MQ, 25 gRPC, ...)?
Then, to get a quote, please fill in the form https://trafficparrot.com/buy.html 



Friday 3 April 2020

What are the challenges you see with third party inbound and outbound testing when using IBM MQ queues?

"What are the challenges you see with third party inbound and outbound testing when using IBM MQ queues?" - Software tester working for a multinational enterprise.

Sometimes third-party systems can cause issues when testing your enterprise systems, for example:
  • The third-party system is not available 24/7 for testing, you need to schedule time on test environments as it is shared between many teams which result in the lower time to market
  • The third-party system does not allow for simulating error responses
  • The third-party test environment might not support the load you require for running your performance tests

In this case, you can use service virtualization or mocking tool to simulate the third party system.

Here is a sample tutorial for Traffic Parrot if you are using IBM MQ via JMS APIs.