Software Research's eValid is an in-browser universal testing tool - it maps and reports on a website's available pages, load performance, scripts and the functional activity of any Java, Flash, ASP or other type of components.
CT Labs was asked to run the system through its paces. In the process, they found it to be a powerful tool, calling it "intuitive and flexible."
"Because each browser instance looks like a real user, and behaves like one," the testers report, "it can test anything that can be browsed: PHP, HTTP/HTTPS, JavaScript, XML, Java Applets, Flash, ASP, JSP, ActiveX controls, etc."
They also remarked that they were confident that during the load testing portion of the survey, the load created by eValid "is a real server load, because it is not just downloads of the base web pages...but actual client-side use of the target server."
The Test and the Goals
CT Labs set out to answer several basic questions, including an analysis of the installation from the administrator's point of view; how easy it was to use from an end-user's viewpoint; and how well the product's features live up to their billing as the vendor reports them.
The testers set up eValid on one of the CT Labs workstations, and connected it via IP to the internet in order to access the CT Labs website for analysis.
Evaluation Results
Installation was "very easy," as you would expect from a product that's sold directly to untrained end users. It required that the user run Internet Explorer 5.5, which is easy enough for a user to upgrade to if it's not on the machine already - but the lack of the most current version of IE on the installation CD was cited as the "only thing that could make the installation easier."
Likewise, the documentation was provided in a form convenient for the end user - online HTML documents that were deemed "well organized."
EValid works by installing itself as a toolbar that works alongside and integrated into Internet Explorer. CT Labs reported that "eValid did a very good job of designing an unobtrusive application that allows the full range of eValid functionality within Internet Explorer."
CT Labs testers also report that they had some fun with the functionality tests they carried out on eValid. The Site Analysis tool gives you a three dimensional graphical view of your website as a whole. (You can see a screenshot of this and some of the other cool features in the full CT Labs report.
Besides getting to see your site as a dynamic whole, you can use the Site Analysis component to isolate things that need to be optimized: old pages, overly large ones, pages that load slowly, and so forth.
It becomes cumbersome on large sites with more than 5,000 links (like our own CommWeb site), and for that CT Labs makes the sensible recommendation that Site Analysis be used on subsections of the site.
When they used it to analyze their own site, it found a fair number of broken links, some of which were not in fact broken, but, interestingly, required a plug-in that wasn't found in the browser (in this case, Flash).
For testing functionality, test scripts are extremely easy to create ("much like a macro," CT Labs reports).
The testers were particularly interested in performance logging features. They liked the fact that eValid uses a real browser instance -- with real browser behavior and page loading - to test complex systems. The monitoring mechanisms include a way to alert administrators about page loads that don't meet specific definable thresholds, for example, and log those instances to a file.
Nice, but is it enough? "This type of feature makes one wish for full scripting abilities: branching, script variables, looping mechanisms, etc. Unfortunately eValid does not yet support these capabilities," say the testers.
Still, they rated the overall functionality of the system very highly.
See the the full CT Labs report here.
