I’ve seen testers recommending The Art of War or Weinberg books which are not about testing at all. I’ve also seen performance testers recommending knowledge of probability theory, statistics and modeling principles. I don’t apply this knowledge in performance testing myself – well at least not directly. I never think about things like distribution function, mean deviation, etc. Do you? Don’t I ?!

I looked through the new LoadRunner certifications.

Accredited Integration Specialist in HP Performance Center v9. Two Prometric exams, $150 each.

Accredited Systems Engineer in HP Performance Center v9. Two exams, look somewhat similar to what Mercury had before, $750 each.

Almost all experts agree that pre-deployment "waterfall" performance testing (which, with the record/playback method, confused by many as the performance testing itself) is not enough - too little, too late. Actually it is just one very specific way of performance testing - with a full spectrum of other approaches, which are used so infrequently (at least as intentional performance testing techniques) that I don't recall finding any good classification. Thinking about it, I see several dimensions of performance testing which, although definitely correlated, probably might be considered somewhat independently - of course, just a raw idea for the moment, just an effort to order thoughts a little.

Scott Barber has teamed up with Rosie Sherry of DrivenQA to bring PTSS Training to Brighton & Hove, UK.

Sign-up now for Performance Testing for Managers or Performance Testing for Software Systems; A Heuristic Approach.

Looks like the pre-production validation approach to performance testing becomes typical for large corporations (if there is any at all):

-get the system ready
-develop all scripts requested (sometimes offshore)
-run them all together
-compare with the requirements provided
-allow some percentage of errors according to the requirements
-involve the development team if requirements were missed

This morning I arrived in Brazil. For the next 2 weeks I’ll be doing some consulting, some training, and speaking at 3 conferences spanning Brazil and Uruguay.

The first is Performance Summit 2008 hosted by Dell Brazil. The local organization team, including my friends and top-notch performance testers Carlos Panato and Walter Munstock, have already gone well out of their way to make me feel at home. Thanks guys!

As some of you may recall, a couple of years ago I ran a workshop on Agile Performance testing.

You can find out more about this by searching for WOPR7.

The general theme, with the exception of one experience report, focused on post-hoc performance testing. A lot of work has been done over the last decade to advance functional test-driven development. When I say 'functional' I don't mean 'application level tests' (a.k.a. acceptance tests); I mean tests at the level of unit, acceptance and every level in between where these tests are concerned with functional behaviours (of the unit or the application respectively).

What follows is nothing new. I only try to take another look to what have been written so far. Scott Barber recently commented The whole situation is sad. Tool vendors dominate the training market (at least in performance testing) . Perhaps I don’t care for training as I train my people myself, but I care for stereotype created by dominating vendors. I will bring my own understanding of by-effect caused by load tools bringing the nice load tools. No I don’t say that performance testing is no more an art. But there are certain limits we are yet to break.