Conference Presentations

Performance Testing SQL-based Applications

Often, we discover the "real" software performance issues only after deploying the product in a production environment. Even though performance, scalability, stability, and reliability are standards of today's software development, organizations often wait until the end of the development life cycle to discover these limitations, resulting in late deliveries and even chaos. He embraces agile development's philosophies to explain how performance testers can identify and resolve software performance issues early and continue performance testing throughout the development process. Learn how to optimize the use of performance tuning tools such as SQL profiler and MS PerfMon to identify and fix MS SQL server, application, and Web server performance issues. Institute agile methods in your performance testing efforts to avoid that "Oh, no!" moment when the system goes live.

Alim Sharif, The Ultimate Software Group
Performance Testing Throughout the Life Cycle

Even though it is easy to say that you should continuously test your application for performance during development, how do you really do it? What are the processes for testing performance early and often? What kinds of problems will you find at the different stages? Chris Patterson shares the tools and techniques he recently used during the development of a highly concurrent and highly scalable server that is shipping soon. Chris explores how developers and testers used common tools and frameworks to accelerate the start of performance testing during product development. Explore the challenges they faced while testing a version 1 product, including defining appropriate performance and scale goals, simulating concurrent user access patterns, and generating a real world data set. Learn from his team's mistakes and their successes as Chris shares both the good and the bad of the process and results.

Chris Patterson, Microsoft
Agile Performance Testing

Approaching performance testing with a rigid plan and narrow specialization often leads to testers' missing performance problems or to prolonged performance troubleshooting. By making the process more agile, the efficiency of performance testing increases significantly—and that extra effort usually pays off multi-fold, even before the end of performance testing.

Alexander Podelko
Life as a Performance Tester

At the core of most performance testing challenges and failed performance testing projects are serious misunderstandings and miscommunications within the project team. Scott Barber and Dawn Haynes share approaches to overcoming some of the most common frustrations facing performance testers today. Rather than simply telling you how to improve understanding and communicate performance testing concepts, Scott and Dawn demonstrate their approaches through an amusing role play of interactions between a lead performance tester and a non-technical executive.

Scott Barber, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
STARWEST 2008: Performance Engineering: More Than Just Load Testing

Performance testing that is done once or a few times as part of the system test is not the right approach for many systems that must change and grow for years. Rex Black discusses a different approach--performance engineering--that is far more than performing load testing during the system test. Performance engineering takes a broad look at the environment, platforms, and development processes and how they affect a system's ability to perform at different load levels on different hardware and networks. While load testers run a test before product launch to alleviate performance concerns, performance engineers have a plan for conducting a series of performance tests throughout the development lifecycle and after deployment. A comprehensive performance methodology includes performance modeling, unit performance tests, infrastructure tuning, benchmark testing, code profiling, system validation testing, and production support.

Rex Black, QA Software Consultant/Trainer
Avoid Preformance Testing Data Deception

Don't be fooled by your performance test results. Performance testing can easily generate an unwieldy amount of data-some relevant and some not. Testers and their tools often use statistical methods to make sense of the data, but using statistics requires sacrificing accuracy and thoroughness. The good news is that we do not need to understand all the details to make good use of test results. The challenge is to determine what information really matters and how to present it in a useful manner. Join Ben Simo as he addresses common performance test statistical problems including built-in bias, agreeable averages, invisible inadequacies, gargantuan groupings, stingy sets, mountainous molehills, creative charting, alien alliances, and more. Find out how statistical reporting can deceive rather than inform-often unintentionally-and recognize what the numbers do not say.

Ben Simo, Standard & Poor's
Preformance Testing in Enterprise Application Environments

As systems become more complex--serving the enterprise and implemented on the Web and across the Internet-performance testing is becoming more important and more difficult. David Chadwick suggests that the starting point is to design tests that reflect real user activity, including independent arrivals of transactions and varying input data to prevent "cache only" results. David explains how to break down the end-to-end system response time into the distributed components involved in processing the transactions. Learn to use resource-monitoring data to discover bottlenecks on individual systems. By examining the frequency and time spent in various processes, performance testers can determine where resources are being consumed and how to tune a system for better performance.

David Chadwick, IBM
The Chivalrous Team Member

Using the ten virtues described in Brian Price's modern code of chivalry, Martin and Mike illustrate the similarities between the best performing software team members of today and the Knights of the Round Table.

Load and Performance Test Plan (template)

This load andperformance test template will help the user to design an effective load test plan. The template covers all aspects of a load testing phase or level. 

 

Shujaat  Bukhari's picture Shujaat Bukhari
Load Generation Capabilities for Effective Performance Testing

To carry out performance testing of Web applications, you must ensure that sufficiently powerful hardware is available to generate load levels. At the same time, you need to avoid investing in unnecessarily expensive hardware "just to be sure." A valid model for estimating the load generation capabilities of performance testing tools on different hardware configurations will help you generate the load you need with the minimum hardware. Rajeev Joshi believes the models provided by most tool vendors are too simplistic for practical use. In fact, in addition to the hardware configuration, the load generation capabilities of any tool are a function of many factors: the number of users, frequency and time distribution of requests, data volume, and think time. Rajeev presents a model for the open source load generator tool, Jmeter, which you can adapt for any performance testing tool.

John Scarborough, Aztecsoft

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