Perfwolf test services seeks to partner with your test managers, PMs, production support staff and testers in order to incorporate accurate, meaningful load and performance testing into your development cycle. The end result is a measurement-driven testing and development organization.
To meet the varying demands organizations place on performance testing, a team people is often required. Read our article about Load and Performance teams. While this classical structure may not be appropriate for all of today’s software projects, organizations seeking to improve the performance of their application ignore this structure at their peril.
6.The Performance PM: Driving for a Faster Product, by John Spilker
Providing Setup, Execution, and Training of Load and Performance Testing at Your Place of Business.
At Perfwolf we seek to steer companies away from waterfall style load testing and to guide dev, test, and management teams toward daily “unit load testing” (load build verification tests) of their applications.
- Management needs an overview (frequently in graphical form) of the performance and capacity of the application. This requires complex, application level tests and summarizing large amounts of data.
- Developers think in terms of unit testing the particular part of the application they have just coded. They want results quickly and would rather work with numbers if preparing graphs would delay testing.
- Production support people are the “fire-fighters” for your application. They are the first to be called when there is a performance problem in a production release. They don’t usually have time to be bothred with the numbers management or dev’s are interested in, but instead are interested in test data about the stability, CPU, and memory utilization of the code Devs and Managers are going to put on their machines.
Critical Reading to Help Meet All Organizational Goals of Load Testing
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/content/RationalEdge/sep04/dimaggio/index.html
“The secret to assembling a successful software team is not hiring superstars but rather ensuring that team members have diverse strengths and skill sets, this article asserts. Addressing project and team managers, it describes desirable characteristics for different team members as well as traits of team members who need supervision and correction.”
2. High-Performance Software Testing Teams, by Len DiMaiggio, IBM Software Quality Engineer
http://www.logigear.com/newsletter/high_performance_testing.asp
“As an activity, performance testing is widely misunderstood, particularly by executives and managers. This misunderstanding can cause a variety of difficulties—including outright project failure. This article details the topics that I find myself teaching executives and managers time and time again. Learning, understanding, and applying this knowledge on your performance testing projects will put you on the fast track to success.”
3. High Performance Testing, by Scott Barber
http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid92_gci1277710,00.htm
“Over and over again, performance testers express to me how frustrating it is that, no matter how hard they work, no matter how much data they collect, or how accurate that data is, they feel as if they have virtually no impact on the actual performance of the application when it goes live. That is probably why my most frequently requested conference talk, since I first gave it in 2003, has been about building and managing a collaborative performance testing and tuning team effectively.”
4. There is No I in Team, by Scott Barber
http://www.perftestplus.com/resources/tuning_teams_ppt.pdf
“Teams are built, they don’t just happen.
Performance testers have to start the collaboration by being conversant with developers.
Developers will help you test better if you help them develop better.
Red-tape is poisonous.
Report symptoms, then help find causes.”
5. Tuning Test Teams, by Scott Barber
http://eurostarcommunity.blogspot.com/2006/09/captain-of-your-special-teamsthe.html
“So what makes the performance tester so unique? On top of their specialization as a performance tester, these individuals tend to be competent and have experience in a wide variety of roles enabling them to effectively contribute to virtually any aspect of the team. Let's take a brief look at all the different roles a performance tester assumes at various points during a project.”
1. Load and Performance Test Teams, by Charles Morrison, Director PerfWolf Test Services
There are often widely varying organizational goals for performance testing:
Different approaches to load testing are required to meet the needs of each group.
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