In my current role I'm lucky enough to get a lot of support from development. They really care about the performance of the application and want to help me test it. So when I run into certain kinds of application related stumbling blocks -- a generated hash key that expires in 3 days as a security measure, after which that part of the app won't work with the old key by design, or a page with really a lot of IDs generated each time, that the server won't accept any that don't match upon submit, another security measure -- just to give two examples, developers often offer to take them out for me so I can test. "We can take that out so you can test, and we'll just put it back in before we ship." Woah. Red flag here. Wait. Stop.

connectionstrings.com

If you didn't know about connectionstrings.com, you need to know about connectionstrings.com. Formats for every connection string under the sun apparently...

Be the change you want to see in the world. Sorry for the cliché, but I'm of the opinion that wise sayings become clichés because they express solid wisdom. Clichés are just over-used statements of wisdom. The icky part is the over-use from being shallowly bandied about, not the wisdom.

I've recently changed jobs, and the only thing about the new job that I'm not pleased as punch about is that it's not an agile shop.

While responding to one of the briefest of Mike Kelly's posts, I came up with something that seemed worth repeating in my own blog:

With each defect we find, do we long for some ideal software that has no bugs anyone can seem to find and performs really well right off the bat -- an ideal of software that really just does not exist?

After about 5 years testing performance full time (web applications), it seems to me now that it just does not matter how you test performance, so long as you do test it. How you test performance is just not relevant. User community modeling, transactionally/throughput oriented, system/architecture oriented, even hardware/architecture oriented -- it doesn't matter. It's like there is no "wrong way", nor does it seem there is a "best" way, even within the same context. Pick the approach that seems to fit your situation the best, or even the one that you just understand the best.