No further commentary needed.

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

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.

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Executive Director, Association for Software Testing

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

 

"If you can see it in your mind...

     you will find it in your life."

I'm working with a customer that is implementing a website that allows customers to purchase products... This site has to talk to various webservices to obtain information about pricing and delivery options.

They were concerned that they didn't know what the interface for the delivery options web service was going to be so of course, I simply highlighted that this should be abstracted from their system as much as possible. All they new is that for a given order (made up of delivery address and the list of products) delivery options will vary depending on the types of products ordered and the delivery address. Other solutions (such as an internal call-centre package) will also be using the delivery options web service.

Below is the paper I submitted as a prologue to an experience report, discussion, and (hopefully) additional research that I'm presenting for the first time during:

This is the second installment of a currently unknown number of posts about heuristics and mnemonics I find valuable when teaching and conducting performance testing.

 

Other posts about performance testing heuristics and mnemonics are:

 

• Installment 1 - Performance Testing Core Principles: CCD IS EARI
• Installment 3 - Model Workloads for Performance Testing: FIBLOTS

 

I have struggled for over 7 years now with first figuring out and then trying to explain all the different "types" of performance tests. You know the ones:

 

• Performance Test
• Load Test
• Stress Test
• Spike Test
• Endurance Test
• Reliability Test
• Component Test
• Configuration Test
• {insert your favorite word} Test

 

Well, I finally have an alternative.

 

IVECTRAS

Read the full blog entry