Q: What is Application Service?
A: Application Services refers to loosely coupled, executable application components linked dynamically over the network with open standards. Typically, Web Services solutions make use of software components that employ one or a combination of the following XML standards - SOAP, WSDL or UDDI.

Q: What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
A: Search Engine Optimization is the process of making ones website content more search engine friendly to attract traffic by ranking higher. Search Engine Genie is the most experienced hand in the field of search engine optimization. Search Engine Optimization researches your keywords and optimizes your site based on the most relevant keywords and drive relevant traffic to your site via the major search engines

Q: What is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?
A: A Service Oriented Architecture is essentially a collection of services. Service Oriented Architecture services communicate with each other. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed. Service Oriented Architectures are not a new thing. The first Service Oriented Architecture for many people in the past was with the use DCOM or Object Request Brokers (ORBs) based on the CORBA specification.

Q: What is Outsourcing?
A: Outsourcing refers to a company that contract with another company to provide services that might otherwise be performed by in-house employees. Many large companies now outsource jobs such as call center services, e-mail services, and payroll. These jobs are handled by separate companies that specialize in each service, and are often located overseas.

Q: What is Database Administration?
A: Database administration is the process of establishing computerized databases, and insuring their recoverability, integrity, security, availability, reliability, and performance. A data resource management function that includes responsibility for developing and maintaining the organization’s data dictionary, designing and monitoring the performance of databases, and enforcing standards for database use and security.

Q: What is Software Testing?
A: The process of questioning a product in order to evaluate it, where the "questions" are operations the tester attempts to execute with the product, and the product answers with its behavior in reaction to the probing of the tester.

Q: What are the Types of Testing?
A: Following are the Types of Software Testing:

Load Test	Failover Test	Soak Test
Stress Testing	Targeted Infrastructure Test	Performance Test
Network Sensitivity Test	Volume Test	SociabilityTest
Tuning Cycle Test	Protocol Test	Thick Client Test
Thin Client Application Test

Q: What is Load Test?
A: Load Tests are end to end performance tests under anticipated production load. The primary objective of this test is to determine the response times for various time critical transactions and business processes and that they are within documented expectations (or Service Level Agreements - SLAs). The Load test also measures the capability of the application to function correctly under load, by measuring transaction pass/fail/error rates. This test is one of the most fundamental load and performance tests and needs to be well understood.

Q: What is Failover Testing?
A: Failover Tests verify of redundancy mechanisms while under load. For example, Failover Tests testing determines what will happen if multiple web servers are being used under peak anticipated load, and one of them dies. Does the load balancer react quickly enough? Can the other web servers handle the sudden dumping of extra load? This sort of testing allows technicians to address problems in advance, in the comfort of a testing situation, rather than in the heat of a production outage.

Q: What is a Soak Test or a.k.a. Endurance Testing?
A: Soak testing is running a system at high levels of load for prolonged periods of time. A soak test would normally execute several times more transactions in an entire day (or night) than would be expected in a busy day, to identify and performance problems that appear after a large number of transactions have been executed. Also, due to memory leaks and other defects, it is possible that a system may ‘stop’ working after a certain number of transactions have been processed. It is important to identify such situations in a test environment.

Q: What is a Stress Testing?
A: Stress Tests determine the load under which a system fails, and how it fails. This is in contrast to Load Testing, which attempts to simulate anticipated load. It is important to know in advance if a ‘stress’ situation will result in a catastrophic system failure, or if everything just “goes really slow”. There are various varieties of Stress Tests, including spike, stepped and gradual ramp-up tests. Catastrophic failures require restarting various infrastructures and contribute to downtime, a stress-full environment for support staff and managers, as well as possible financial losses. Stress test is one of the most fundamental load and performance tests and needs to be well understood.

Q: What is Targeted Infrastructure Testing?
A: Targeted Infrastructure Tests are isolated tests of each layer and or component in an end to end application configuration. It includes communications infrastructure, Load Balancers, Web Servers, Application Servers, Crypto cards, Citrix Servers, Database… allowing for identification of any performance issues that would fundamentally limit the overall ability of a system to deliver at a given performance level.

Q: What is Performance Testing?
A: Performance Tests are tests that determine end to end timing (benchmarking) of various time critical business processes and transactions, while the system is under low load, but with a production sized database. This sets ‘best possible’ performance expectation under a given configuration of infrastructure. It also highlights very early in the testing process if changes need to be made before load testing should be undertaken.

Q: What is Network sensitivity testing?
A: Network sensitivity tests are tests that set up scenarios of varying types of network activity (traffic, error rates...), and then measure the impact of that traffic on various applications that are bandwidth dependant. Very 'chatty' applications can appear to be more prone to response time degradation under certain conditions than other applications that actually use more bandwidth.

Q: What is Volume Testing?
A: Volume Tests are often most appropriate to Messaging, Batch and Conversion processing type situations. In a Volume Test, there is often no such measure as Response time. Instead, there is usually a concept of Throughput.

Q: What is Sensitivity analysis testing?
A: Sensitivity analysis testing can determine impact of activities in one system on another related system. Such testing involves a mathematical approach to determine the impact that one system will have on another system.

Q: What is Tuning Cycle Testing?
A: A series of test cycles can be executed with a primary purpose of identifying tuning opportunities. Tests can be refined and re-targeted 'on the fly' to allow technology support staff to make configuration changes so that the impact of those changes can be immediately measured

Q: What is Protocol Testing?
A: Protocol tests involve the mechanisms used in an application, rather than the applications themselves. For example, a protocol test of a web server may involve a number of HTTP interactions that would typically occur if a web browser were to interact with a web server - but the test would not be done using a web browser.

Q: What is Thick Client Application Testing?
A: A Thick Client (also referred to as a fat client) is a purpose built piece of software that has been developed to work as a client with a server. It often has substantial business logic embedded within it, beyond the simple validation that is able to be achieved through a web browser. A thick client is often able to be very efficient with the amount of data that is transferred between it and its server, but is also often sensitive to any poor communications links.

Q: What is a Thin client Application Testing?
A: An internet browser that is used to run an application is said to be a thin client. But even thin clients can consume substantial amounts of CPU time on the computer that they are running on. This is particularly the case with complex web pages that utilize many recently introduced features to liven up a web page. Rendering a page after hitting a SUBMIT button may take several seconds even though the server may have responded to the request in less than one second.