Thursday, June 25, 2009

Website evaluation scorecard

Sometimes the best tools are the simplest :-)

I had to review some websites recently for usability, correct implementation, and security. Naturally, I thought there might be some open source tools or perhaps a scorecard to assist the process. Surprisingly, I didn't find much in either category. So, I decided to create a simple spreadsheet template that can be used to evaluate and compare websites in a consistent fashion.

The Website Evaluation Scorecard is available for download at sourceforge.net

JMeter - A very handy tool

I suppose some techies will laff when they read this, but I'm getting a first-time intro to JMeter and it's COOL! It's an open source tool, from Apache, which allows the test engineer to codify HTTP and other protocol requests, issue them to a test server, save the responses, and validate them vs. one or more assertions. Since it's written in Java, it runs on Windows or Linux nicely, too.

The UI is a little clunky and you have to make sure to Save your configuration changes before starting a run (it doesn't prompt you to do so), but it provides a lot of testing capability and flexibility.

Amazing robots

Check out the specialized robots from Olin College. The robofish variants are amazing!

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Keeping product love alive

I saw this interesting lead-off quote, from Jeff James' SharePoint Everywhere article in the June Windows IT Pro print issue:

Microsoft's approach to the SharePoint market has hit pay dirt by focusing less on next-generation feature sets and more on providing solutions that customers truly need.

I think it's important for tech companies to realize this. What led customers to falling in love in the first place is important to keep in mind, too. It's easy to focus on flashy new features and lose sight of the day-to-day functionality that brought customers to the product in the first place. That stuff often remains "pay dirt" and keeping it alive and well is an important consideration, too.