Conference Presentations

Streamlining Cloud Based Testing
Video

On-premise vis-a-vis Cloud based testing. Look at various cloud based performance testing models, advantages, and pitfalls in performance testing from Cloud. SandStorm - cloud based performance testing solution.

Shirish Bhale, Impetus
Collaborative Web-based Testing for Product and Software Development
Video

How to establish instantaneous traceability with Requirements and Development Artifacts. How to automatically process and identify unit test methods and promote as "First Class Citizens". How to perform any test. Test any product. Test on any device. Anywhere.

David Merrill, Polarion
Performance Testing the SMART Way

Although testers know the ins and outs of functional testing, many of us don't have a smart process for doing software performance testing. To improve her personal performance testing skills, Mieke Gevers looked at processes from other disciplines-automobile manufacturing, medical rehabilitation, and project management. It was here she found SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Learn how Mieke’s organization used SMART to deal with chaotic performance testing situations-lack of clear requirements, discrepancies between business objectives and reality, running out of time, and changes in technology. In Mieke's organization, SMART has helped them save time, react quickly to production requests for developing and running tests, develop reproducible performance tests, and create better test results documentation.

Mieke Gevers, AQIS
Performance Testing Cloud-hosted Applications

Cloud computing and cloud-hosted applications will alter the way you think about and carry out performance testing. Based on his experience with projects at Microsoft, Dennis Bass explores how cloud platforms pose new opportunities and challenges for performance engineers, and what that means when bringing your next generation applications onto the cloud. Neelesh explores what's the same and what's different with cloud-hosted applications compared to traditional ones. He explains why we can't put off performance testing of cloud-hosted applications until the very end as we usually do with traditional software. Find out why improper performance test planning can result in inconsistent or invalid findings. Avoid unexpectedly high cloud testing costs by accurately estimating the type and amount of computer capacity your application will need.

Dennis Bass, Microsoft
Performance Testing Mobile Applications

The mobile web is growing at an unprecedented rate with people around the globe using their mobile phones to connect, network, share, and meet. Mobile has suddenly emerged as one of the primary delivery platforms for many companies. A mobile application that fails to perform as expected has a negative impact on revenue and increases customer support costs. It is essential that your mobile applications are tested for performance, scalability, and other critical non-functional issues before they are released to the market. Shirish Bhale shares mobile app challenges he’s overcome–the prevalence of custom protocols, lack of diagnostic tools, simulation of user workloads, and more. Learn about the mobile profilers, tracers, stubs, simulators, and load testing tools that help in mobile application performance testing. Find out how to replicate realistic conditions to help you get meaningful performance test results.

Shirish Bhale, Impetus Technologies Inc.
STAREAST 2011: Performance Engineering: More Than Just Load Testing

Performance testing that is only done at the last minute–just prior to launch–is the wrong approach for complex systems which have many opportunities for performance bottlenecks. Rex Black discusses a different approach-performance engineering-that is far more comprehensive and valuable than merely 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. Performance engineers use a structured process to conduct a series of performance tests throughout development and after deployment. These tests includes performance modeling, unit performance tests, infrastructure tuning, benchmark testing, code profiling, system validation testing, and production support.

Rex (Red) Black, J9 Technologies
Software Performance Testing: Beyond Record and Playback

Predictable software performance is crucial to the success of almost every enterprise system and, in some cases, to the success of the company itself. Before deploying systems into production, management is demanding comprehensive performance testing and reliable test results. This has created significant pressure on development managers and performance test engineers. Alim Sharif guides you through the basic steps for planning, creating, executing, and reporting performance tests. He explains how to actively involve stakeholders-application developers, database administrators, network engineers, IT infrastructure groups, and senior managers-to identify and resolve performance issues. Alim discusses how to maintain the balance between these stakeholder interests during each step and demonstrates how to effectively lead the performance test effort.

Alim Sharif, Ultimate Software Group
Variations on a Theme: Performance Testing and Functional Unit Testing

The right types of performance tests can reveal functionality problems that would not usually be detected during unit testing. For example, concurrency and thread safety problems can manifest themselves in poor performance or deadlocks, leading to incorrect output. Because unit tests inherently lack concurrent activity, these problems rarely manifest themselves in functional tests. André Bondi describes test structures based on rudimentary models that reveal valuable insights about system scalability, performance, and system function. For example, to ensure that resource utilization increases linearly with the load-a necessary condition for scalability-transactions should be submitted to systems for long periods of time at different rates. Conversely, when the load is constant, performance measures should be constant.

Andre Bondi, Siemens Corporate Research
Focusing Test Efforts with System Usage Patterns

Faced with the reality of tight deadlines and limited resources, many software delivery teams turn to risk-based test planning to ensure that the most critical components of the software are production ready. Although this strategy can prove effective, it is only as good as your underlying risk analysis. Unfortunately, understanding where risk lies within a product is difficult with the analysis often resulting in little more than an “educated guess.” These risk-based testing exercises can lead to uneven test coverage and the uneasy feeling that the team has neglected to test what is really important. Dan Craig describes how to employ system usage patterns and production defect reports to identify the real risks in a system.

Dan Craig, Coveros, Inc.
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

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