A magazine version of my Agile Performance Testing article was published in the November 2009 issue of Software Test & Performance.

I explained what this article is about in my earlier post

I put my CMG'09 presenatation A Performance Engineering Story with Database Monitoring on my site.

By the way, CMG'10 call for papers and workshops are available, next year it would be a separate subject area for Load Testing.

There is a separate subject area for Performance Engineering and Load Testing at CMG'09 (held December 6-11 Dallas, Texas). The number of performance testing sessions significantly increased. Of course, there are a lot of excellent sessions in traditionally strong CMG areas such as capacity planning, monitoring, performance analysis, and modeling.

Scott Barber's Performance Testing Innovations ... or Not is, as usual, pretty interesting and thought provoking.

It indeed looks like there are not many innovations in performance testing. Yes, I also believe that agile is the "native" way of doing performance testing and good performance testers always did it in an agile way (even when the word wasn't used in this context yet), it is exactly what I wrote in my CMG'08 paper Agile Performance Testing.

Two Views of Agile Unit Testing reminded me (indirectly) the QAForums Agile Performance Testing - Oxymoron? discussion about agile development and performance testing some time ago

Well, if we talk about agile development I don't see any problem with performance testing at all: you have a working build each iteration – you test it. What is a problem? It should be synonym, not oxymoron.

I was asked several times about the fate of the Empirix load testing tool Oracle acquired earlier (it was not the whole Empirix company: the company still exist selling other tools / services; Oracle acquired Web application testing software assets from Empirix).

It is now Oracle Application Testing Suite, a part of Oracle Enterprise Manager's suite of Application Quality Management products, and can be downloaded from there (subject to Oracle Technology Network Developer License Terms). The name of the load testing tool is Oracle Load Testing for Web Applications.

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...