WOPR10: Call For Proposals (CFP)

Theme: How can we teach performance testing?

Every aspect of performance testing from problem awareness to systematic modeling, performance testing experiments, result analysis to problem reporting and getting the darn system actually working involves a rich an complex set of interrelated skills coupled with a blend of detailed technical knowledge and rich context sensitivity.  What are these skills?  How can we teach them?

WOPR10 will explore the topic of teaching performance testing with seasoned professionals and expert performance testers as well as teachers and instructional designers.

See the complete CFP on the WOPR Web Page

Experimental Methods in Teaching Performance Testing (Pre-WOPR Event)

In the past year, the number of publications and training courses available related to testing the performance of software systems has increased dramatically.  Over the last 7 or so years, most training courses related to performance testing that were not tool focused have fizzled out quickly after the initial buzz.  The primary reason for this is what is known in academia as “the transfer problem”, meaning that what students learn in the courses, they are unable to use/apply when they get back to the office.  One of the keys to minimizing the transfer problem is through relevant, engaging exercises during class.

Developing relevant, engaging exercises for performance testing skills is particularly difficult to do for the following reasons:

• It is both time and cost prohibitive to develop and deliver “project like” exercises.
• When teaching a public class, instructors cannot assume that students will be comfortable enough with the tools used in the exercises to be successful (unless the instructor additionally trains the use of the tool)
• Web-based exercises transfer exceptionally poorly to students who test anything other than websites.
• Exercises that are not web-based are completely rejected by (usually the majority of) students who performance test web-based applications.
• What we are trying to teach are complex, multi-disciplinary, cognitive skills.

That said, this is not an impossible problem, simply a hard one.

Immediately prior to WOPR10, I (Scott Barber) will be hosting a workshop designed to explore the challenge of addressing the transfer problem through innovative and/or experimental, classroom based, exercises related to performance testing.

See the complete announcement on the WOPR website

Posted by Christopher Semturs, Software Engineer in Test, Zurich

For those German-speaking folks among our readers of this English Google Testing Blog we have exciting news: We have just launched the German Testing Blog!

This is a tribute to the fact that the German-speaking software test community is one of the biggest non-english audiences of this blog. The german blog will contain a mix of German versions of postings from this blog as well as unique postings about regional-specific issues from Europe. Some of our biggest engineering offices outside of US are in Europe, e.g. in Switzerland and the UK.

Bugzilla is a popular bug tracking tool. The Bugzilla 3.1.x series will culminate in the release of Bugzilla 3.2. In addition to various useful bug fixes compared to 3.1.2, Bugzilla 3.1.3 contains major new features, such as an improved user interface, new custom field types, and very experimental support for Oracle. Bugzilla 3.1.3 is unstable, and should not be used in production environments.

Bug Report To LazyWeb:

Has anyone had success installing wxPython on Windows Vista using the binary installer package?  I get a generic Windows error and the install crashes.  I'm running Python 2.5 and trying to install wxPython 2.8 (wxPython2.8-win32-ansi-2.8.7.1-py25.exe)

I have never tried wx on Vista.  Has anyone else encountered this?

Bug Report To LazyWeb:

Has anyone had success installing wxPython on Windows Vista using the binary installer package?  I get a generic Windows error and the install crashes.  I'm running Python 2.5 and trying to install wxPython 2.8 (wxPython2.8-win32-ansi-2.8.7.1-py25.exe)

I have never tried wx on Vista.  Has anyone else encountered this?

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Update 03/05/08: the installer now works fine on Vista

With great interest read Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College) by James Maguire as well as the original article Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? by Dr. Robert Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg.