I finally got time to look at such LoadRunner functionality as goal-oriented scenarios and SLAs. My first finding was that SLA functionality looks completely unrelated to goal-oriented scenarios. They got somehow related in my head – perhaps because SLA is a production goal in my understanding or, maybe, just because they were introduced in about the same time.

When I looked into SLAs earlier most SLAs I saw were like response time for all transactions should be below 2 sec for 99% of transactions. Looks like we can't do anything like this in LoadRunner – SLAs in LoadRunner are set for average response times. Haven't seen such SLAs before – it means that almost half of transactions may be above the SLA and we still meet the SLA. By the way, it doesn't look like it should be difficult to implement something like "below 2 sec for 99% of transactions" in LoadRunner – looks like SLAs is just a reporting mechanism (could be considered as an enhancement request).

Interesting news: Micro Focus acquires Compuware quality tools, all of Borland. The most interesting question is what they are going to do with two lines of testing products - for load testing, for example, they got Borland/Segue SilkPerformer and Compuware QALoad? By the way, these two products are among few that support multiple protocols.

Well, and it is where Borland ended... I still remember times when Borland competed with Microsoft on the PC development tool market - and, at least in Russia, was definitely more popular...

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) calls for papers and presentations for CMG's 35th International Conference to be held in Dallas, Texas, December 6th through 11th, 2009. Mentoring is available!

Since 1975 CMG is a volunteer organization of performance professionals and the CMG conference is the best place to learn about capacity planning and performance analysis. This year CMG has Performance Engineering and Load Testing subject area, so the program in these areas should be strong too.

Will Foy posted questions in LoadRunner Yahoo group about advancing to next level in performance testing and tuning.

Below is my answer, slightly expanded, with the original questions in italic.

What kinds of resources would you advise them to consult
and use as educational material?

All. I put some links I think may be useful on my site, but a lot more is available around.

I have uploaded my Agile Performance Testing paper and handouts to my website. I have presented it at the CMG conference this year. The paper is about making performance testing (engineering) more agile, more flexible – not about performance testing during agile development. I also uploaded handouts for Building Responsive and Scalable Applications panel. It was pretty interesting panel, we got very good panelists.

Trying to make some suggestions for Building Responsive and Scalable Applications panel I contemplated for a while on this topic.

For a long time we have Software Performance Engineering addressing these issues. As it described in the books and papers of Dr. Connie Smith and Dr. Lloyd Williams, it looks rather as a methodology for me.

CMG Final Agenda (in pdf) is finally available. Online agenda is available too.

Looks like CMG'08 is one more step towards performance testing community. I believe that CMG was the best conference about computer performance for a long time, but now we have significantly more papers related to performance testing and performance engineering. Conference proceedings from 1976 through 2005 are available to the public – probably the largest collection of performance-related papers (and most of them are practical).

I quickly found that my capacity of what I can do in addition to regular work is pretty limited: while I was writing a paper for the upcoming CMG conference and then helping a little with the conference organization as CPE (Computer Performance Evaluation) Subject Area Chair (CMG is a volunteer organization), I wasn't able to blog or update my site (probably more energy than time). Now this is mainly over: the CMG preliminary agenda was just published. It is time to summarize and move forward.