Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics

Wired.com ran their smart list today. If you aren't familiar with it or don't care, at least check out the great press fellow software tester, entrepreneur, and social innovator Thorkil Sonne is getting for Specialisterne here:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist_sonne

While you're at it, why not digg it!

I know there is a lot that we testers disagree about, but if there is one thing we should be able to agree upon, it's that Thorkil, Specialisterne, and the very special people they serve deserve our support and best wishes. I can only hope that this is the spark that get's this (and other such, responsible programs) moving globally. While that would certainly make me happy for Thorkil, the real winners when this takes off will be those who would finally find themselves filling jobs well suited to their skills, those who are reluctantly (and often poorly) doing those jobs now, and their employers who can reassign those reluctant folks to something *they* are better suited for and will complain about less (we all hope) .

Congratulations Thorkil & Specialisterne!!!
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

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

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

A misleading benchmark...

No further commentary needed.


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

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

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

Thoughts on Performance Testing w/o "Tools"

I was recently asked the following question via the "Ask The Expert" feature of SearchSoftwareQuality.com.

How can we conduct performance testing, stress testing, and load testing of a Web application manually without using any tools?

My commentary is reproduced below -- you'll have to click through to see my actual recommendations.

First, I want to express my sympathy to anyone who finds himself in a position of being asked to create multi-user simulations (i.e. the load part of performance/load/stress testing), requesting a load-generation tool, and being denied. In my experience, the excuse of not being able to afford a load-generation tool is almost always just that -- an excuse.

Only once in my career have I found the only tool capable of generating a production-like load against the application I was testing to be prohibitively expensive. (In that case, the tool cost more to purchase than the application was anticipated to earn in a year.) In every other case, either the risk justified the cost or an adequate, inexpensive, or free tool has been available.

The only really good reason to be in this position is if all available tools were considered and none of them supported the application under test (even with customizations and extensions) and you don't have access to the skills (internally or externally) to build a tool of your own -– and that seems unlikely to me.

The simple truth is that if a company is building an application that is realistically expected to have enough users to justify the expense of performance testing, even if that expense is just the time of an employee, that company ought to be projecting enough revenue from the application, or lose enough credibility by having a poorly performing application, to justify either the cost of a tool or the risk (in some company's eyes) of using a free or open source tool.

Now, after saying all of that, I must admit I have found that the vast majority of value that is gained by quality performance testing comes outside of the load-generation tool. Some of my favorite techniques (assuming you are testing websites):

Read the rest of the article here.
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

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

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

Latest Column -- The controversy surrounding the schools of software testing

My latest column...

Periodically, discussions break out in various software testing communities around the Web regarding the schools of software testing.

As I write this, there are discussions going in SQAForums, on the Software-Testing Yahoo! group, and various blogs that (at least up to the time I started writing this piece) reside on or are fed to Testing Reflections. In principle, I'm always pleased when these discussions break out. The point of identifying the schools in the first place was to increase the overall awareness of the diversity in ideologies, practices, and values (i.e. schools of thought) in our field and to stimulate discussion about the situational pros and cons of each. That said, the discussions that actually take place tend to drift off in one or more directions that end up being disappointing, unnecessarily confrontational, and generally not useful.

After witnessing this pattern, participating in these recent discussions, and listening to comments from those who followed the discussions for several years, I've identified several areas in which these discussions go awry. Below, I call those out and share my thoughts about each.

Read the rest of the column.
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

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

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

Latest Column -- Testing training: Disturbing behaviors of students

My latest column...

Drive-by training. Never heard of it? It is exactly what it sounds like. You drive to a training facility (or an instructor drives to you), for a day or three the instructor delivers the pre-packaged training class, then everyone drives back home. It's not the best training model ever invented. There is generally no student assessment, and the only instructor/course provider accountability is reputation. Even so, many good ideas can be shared and lots of students come away feeling that it was well worth "the drive."

As it turns out, I've been delivering a lot of drive-by training to software testers this fall. That in itself isn't particularly noteworthy -- end-of-the-budget year is a popular time for drive-by training -- but something that is noteworthy is that I have noticed a rise in some disturbing behaviors among the individuals and organizations that select and attend drive-by training.
At first, I thought it was just me. But after an informal poll (and some lively discussions) with my employees and trainer friends in the testing realm, I became increasingly convinced that the behaviors I'm noticing are not exclusive to me and that I'm not the only one who thinks they are on the rise.

Read the rest of the column.
 
--
Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

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

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