Performance Testing with Scott Barber - a guide

This course will be available in May 2008 as a 3 day intensive or 1 day overview course.

More details will appear here soon.

Overview

Only rarely are sufficient time, resources and skilled individuals available to teams who are developing commercially driven software systems to effectively apply rigorous approaches to performance test that system. In cases where applying rigorous approaches would not be effective, a risk-based, flexible approach to performance testing is needed. Rigorous or not, any approach to performance testing needs to focus on collecting the data necessary both to assist the development team in identifying, prioritizing, and tuning areas of sub-optimal performance and to assist stakeholders in making sound business decisions related to performance risks.

This unique workshop introduces a heuristic approach to Performance Testing Software Systems that focuses on mitigating risk business and to end users in commercially driven software development environments. This approach marries the software testing insights of James Bach, Rob Sabourin, Cem Kaner and many other members of the Context-Driven School of software testing with the performance testing insights of Alberto Savoia, Ross Collard, Roland Stens, and the rest of the WOPR (Workshop On Performance and Reliability) community. The approach has a track record of success with regard to adequately mitigating business risk in time to keep pace with the commercial aspects of the project. The Microsoft patterns & practices book Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications by J.D. Meier, Scott Barber, Carlos Farre, Prashant Bansode, and Dennis Rea compliments the material presented in this workshop.

Because this workshop emphasize tool agnostic exercises, it is both challenging for experienced performance testers and enlightening for new performance testers. The workshop provides hands-on demonstrations and exercises as well as portable heuristics that you can easily take back to the office and use to train other testers, developers, managers, and executives in some of the most critical and challenging aspects of performance testing software systems.

Who is the ideal student?

The ideal student is anyone who feels driven to be an excellent performance tester of software systems or a manager of performance testers or performance testing projects.

The class is useful to all levels of performance testers and members of the extended performance testing and tuning team, but seems to be most appreciated by seasoned performance testers who want to become expert performance testers or trainers of junior performance testers. The class works well when strong-minded and skeptical students attend the class. They challenge the instructor and make the class better, just like testers should. The intent is to make the workshop as stimulating of an intellectual experience as you can handle.

Course Objectives

In this course, you will learn:

• Nine core principles found in most successful performance testing projects
• Concise, universal heuristics and models for rapid application of those principles
• How to determine and apply oracles to software system performance criteria
• How to apply the core principles into your team’s development process
• How to plan ahead without reducing your ability to react to change
• How to communicate performance testing concepts to non-performance testers
• How to rapidly design performance tests that will achieve your performance testing objectives