Review By: Arvind Pal Singh
06/23/2010I commend the author's great writing style and presentation and his ability to condense performance testing—such a vast and serious topic--in this small-looking book. Anyone working in performance testing will be able to grasp what he says. Molyneaux excellently incorporated his experiences, in particular, in his emphasis on performance testing towards software applications in the real world. In line with author, I, too, hope that this book leads to bringing standards and practices relevant to performance testing, which could be consistently followed across different industries.

I focused mainly on chapter four while reading this book. Other chapters are generalized, and similar material is available in the user manuals of certain performance testing tools. Molyneaux brought his own flavor by providing details from his own perspective. I understand most of the performance testing tools have their own set of parameters, but, overall, the interpretation of the results is more important in order to identify performance bottlenecks. For beginning performance testers, the first three chapters are recommended.

The book also proves useful to experienced performance testers as well and developers involved in fixing performance issues. Molyneaux did a great job in demarcating the practice from any industry tool. I've already recommended this book to my co-workers to strengthen their knowledge. One of my co-workers immediately found the discussion on key performance targets in chapter two especially helpful.

Overall, I have high regard for this book, which has touched a much ignored part of software applications. In the future, I would like Molyneaux to elaborate on chapter five to include application technology and it's impact on performance testing.