DiPerF: an automated DIstributed PERformance testing Framework

We present DiPerF, a distributed performance testing framework, aimed at simplifying and automating service performance evaluation. DiPerF coordinates a pool of machines that test a target service, collects and aggregates performance metrics, and generates performance statistics. The aggregate data collected provide information on service throughput, on service "fairness" when serving multiple clients concurrently, and on the impact of network latency on service performance. Furthermore, using this data, it is possible to build predictive models that estimate a service performance given the service load. We have tested DiPerF on 100+ machines on two testbeds, Grid3 and PlanetLab, and explored the performance of job submission services (pre WS GRAM and WS GRAM) included with Globus Toolkit 3.2.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, will appear in IEEE/ACM Grid2004, November 200

What Causes My Test Alarm? Automatic Cause Analysis for Test Alarms in System and Integration Testing

Driven by new software development processes and testing in clouds, system and integration testing nowadays tends to produce enormous number of alarms. Such test alarms lay an almost unbearable burden on software testing engineers who have to manually analyze the causes of these alarms. The causes are critical because they decide which stakeholders are responsible to fix the bugs detected during the testing. In this paper, we present a novel approach that aims to relieve the burden by automating the procedure. Our approach, called Cause Analysis Model, exploits information retrieval techniques to efficiently infer test alarm causes based on test logs. We have developed a prototype and evaluated our tool on two industrial datasets with more than 14,000 test alarms. Experiments on the two datasets show that our tool achieves an accuracy of 58.3% and 65.8%, respectively, which outperforms the baseline algorithms by up to 13.3%. Our algorithm is also extremely efficient, spending about 0.1s per cause analysis. Due to the attractive experimental results, our industrial partner, a leading information and communication technology company in the world, has deployed the tool and it achieves an average accuracy of 72% after two months of running, nearly three times more accurate than a previous strategy based on regular expressions.Comment: 12 page

Web-Based Student Processes at Community Colleges: Removing Barriers to Access

Colleges and universities are making extensive use of the Internet for collecting admission and financial aid applications. Benefits from online application services are enjoyed by both the educational institution and the prospec¬tive student who applies online. It is vital that web sites offering these services be made accessible so that students with disabilities are afforded the same benefits of online applications as their non-disabled peers. Cornell University’s Employment and Disability Institute was funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) to conduct a project with the following three objectives: 1) survey student services professionals at community colleges to examine the extent of use of the internet for providing services and the awareness of internet accessibility issues, 2) evaluate a sample of community college websites for accessibility and usability by students with and without disabilities, and 3) develop a toolkit for improving access to internet-based services at community colleges

Transgender Need Not Apply: A Report on Gender Identity Job Discrimination

[Excerpt] Make the Road New York investigated possible employment discrimination against transgender job-seekers in Manhattan’s retail sector using the research tool of matched pair testing. We sent out carefully matched pairs of job applicants, one transgender and one not, to apply for the same jobs. Each pair was equivalent in age and ethnicity and equipped with fictionalized resumes that were evenly matched. Both testing pairs underwent extensive training on how to adopt similar interview styles and how to document their job-seeking interactions objectively. Transgender testers were instructed to explicitly inform store managers and interviewers of their transgender status whenever feasible

Transgender Need Not Apply: A Report on Gender Identity Job Discrimination

Make the Road New York investigated possible employment discrimination against transgender job-seekers in Manhattan's retail sector using the research tool of matched pair testing. We sent out carefully matched pairs of job applicants, one transgender and one not, to apply for the same jobs. Each pair was equivalent in age and ethnicity and equipped with fictionalized resumes that were evenly matched. Both testing pairs underwent extensive training on how to adopt similar interview styles and how to document their job-seeking interactions objectively. Transgender testers were instructed to explicitly inform store managers and interviewers of their transgender status whenever feasible.Our research revealed an astonishingly high degree of employment discrimination against our transgender job applicants

Agent Based Test and Repair of Distributed Systems

This article demonstrates how to use intelligent agents for testing and repairing a distributed system, whose elements may or may not have embedded BIST (Built-In Self-Test) and BISR (Built-In Self-Repair) facilities. Agents are software modules that perform monitoring, diagnosis and repair of the faults. They form together a society whose members communicate, set goals and solve tasks. An experimental solution is presented, and future developments of the proposed approach are explore

Visualizing and Interacting with Concept Hierarchies

Concept Hierarchies and Formal Concept Analysis are theoretically well grounded and largely experimented methods. They rely on line diagrams called Galois lattices for visualizing and analysing object-attribute sets. Galois lattices are visually seducing and conceptually rich for experts. However they present important drawbacks due to their concept oriented overall structure: analysing what they show is difficult for non experts, navigation is cumbersome, interaction is poor, and scalability is a deep bottleneck for visual interpretation even for experts. In this paper we introduce semantic probes as a means to overcome many of these problems and extend usability and application possibilities of traditional FCA visualization methods. Semantic probes are visual user centred objects which extract and organize reduced Galois sub-hierarchies. They are simpler, clearer, and they provide a better navigation support through a rich set of interaction possibilities. Since probe driven sub-hierarchies are limited to users focus, scalability is under control and interpretation is facilitated. After some successful experiments, several applications are being developed with the remaining problem of finding a compromise between simplicity and conceptual expressivity