Choosing Performance Testing with Scott Barber (Stickyminds interview reprint)

A Word with the Wise:
Choosing Performance Testing with Scott Barber
by Joseph McAllister

Every kid eventually puts some thought into the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" For PerfTestPlus CTO Scott Barber, who specializes in context-driven performance testing and analysis for distributed multi-user systems, the answer was not "performance tester." He planned to follow in the footsteps of his father, an industrial arts teacher, and sought an ROTC-scholarship-funded degree in civil engineering. In his junior year of college, though, Scott learned that his first years with the Army Corps of Engineers would involve digging foxholes for infantry rather than building bridges with the Seabees.

"I decided that if I was going to be crossing the front lines, I'd much rather be carrying heavy weaponry than heavy shovels," he says.

Paint the room heuristic

The other day, my wife asked me if I could finish painting the bedroom before my conference call in 90 minutes. Naturally, I said that I could and like a good husband, I immediately got started. It wasn't until my phone rang that I realized that I hadn't made it in time. Luckily enough, it was no problem to delay the call by 30 minutes.

While I was finishing up, I realized what had happened. When my wife asked me if I could accomplish the painting in a certain amount of time, my thought process was...

1. If I do it now, it will make her happy.
2. If it takes a little too long, the worst that will happen is that she'll be a little grumpy until I finish, but once I'm done she'll be happy.
3. Once I start, no one is actually going to make me stop before I'm finished... I mean, who wants a mostly painted room?!?
4. I completely overlooked the fact that delaying the phone call could be problematic.

Tester thinking...

Say you were given the following requirements...

•   Users shall be able to enter any of nine predefined data objects
•   User interface shall consist of nine blocks of three rows and three columns
•   Each row, column and/or block shall accept only one member of each data object

What am I describing?

Why all the hype about SOA & Testing?

I've been working on a Webinar and article about testing SOA... because I've been asked to... because SOA is all the rage or something. So what's the big deal?!? Objects that are based on a business process is called a Service... Ok. There are competing "standards" for communication protocols for services... Ok. There are SOA Management Software packages that do what middleware has always done... Ok. Services are assumed to be remote and developed by someone else... Ok. And?

What's the new part? What *haven't* we had to deal with before? What *haven't* we had to deal with in combinations before?

Am I just WAAAAAAAAAY out of the loop, or this 90% hype and 10% pushing problems we've been dealing with for *at least* 6 years working their way into new places?

O-well, back to the article... maybe I'll come up with something more useful to say in it.

--
Scott Barber
President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, & How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

"If you can see it in your mind...
you will find it in your life."

Book Review: Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning

I guess someone appreciated the book review the other month, because very shortly after the column was published, I received a request to review another book. This time the book was "Linux Performance Tuning, Open Source" . I'm sure you're shocked to learn that I said yes, accepted delivery of another free new book a few days later, and read the book during my seemingly endless hours on airplanes these days. My assessment is that, in short, this is another good book that is very much worth a look. This time it took until about three-quarters of the way through before the concepts got too abstract and/or technical for my rather limited Linux background, but once again I put the book down wondering where it was in 2001 when I was trying to configure Linux servers on my own instead of bribing my office-buddy with more beer to do it for me.

As I read, I jotted the following notes: