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.

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.

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.

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.