Two part podcast on the STP site. I say some interesting stuff... or at least I say some stuff that's interesting to me. :)

Twist #52 - With Scott Barber

Twist #53 - The Return of the Barber

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

 

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, & How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

Last week, I hosted STP's Online Performance Summit, a 3 half-day, 9 session, live, interactive webinar. As far as I know, this was the first multi-presenter, multi-day, live webinar by testers for testers. The feedback from attendees and presenters that I have seen has all been very positive, and personally, I think it went very well. On top of that, I had a whole lot of fun playing "radio talk show host".

The event sold out early at 100 attendees with more folks wanting to attend, but were unable. Since this was an experiment of sorts in terms of format and delivery, we made a commitment to the smallest and least expensive level of service from the webinar technology provider, and by the time we realized we had more interest than "seats", it was simply too late to make the necessary service changes to accommodate more folks. We won't be making that mistake again for our next online summit to be held October 11-13 on the topic of "Achieving Business Value with Test Automation". Keep your eyes on the STP website for more information about that and other future summits.

With all of that context, now to the point of this post.

Fred Beringer of SOASTA posed that question on his blog yesterday.

An interesting question, so being a tester, what did I do? Right, I tested it. It took all of one test for me to come to my conclusion...

NOT WITH RESULTS LIKE THIS!!

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Scott Barber

President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.

 

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

Contributing Author,Beautiful Testing, & How To Reduce the Cost of Testing (TBP Summer 2011, Taylor and Francis)

Yesterday, SOASTA announced their new product, CloudTest Lite (Press Release). It's not common that I get excited about a tool product release, but this is different. This product has the potential to change the market for the better.

Scratch that. I'll be shocked if it doesn't change the market for the better.

Why is that, you ask? Consider the following attributes of CloutTest Lite:

• It's a fully featured, easy to learn and use, enterprise class, modern, performance testing tool for web & mobile applications
• All you need to use it is a reasonably modern machine connected to the internet and a web browser.
  • You don't need to buy, install, configure or maintain load generation machines.
  • The "license" is tied to your personal credentials, so you can design, create, execute, and analyze your tests from any machine you want without needing to figure out how to point to the license server, or how to get onto the corporate network from your favorite internet cafe.
  • You can even do much of the design, test enhancement, and analysis entirely off-line.
• You can simulate up to 100 virtual users any time you want. No more scheduling time on the controller days or weeks in advance guessing the app will be ready for your test. No more having to wait until your next scheduled time to re-run your test when you see something 'wonky' in your data.
• It's free.
  • Yes, I said free.
  • As in, you never need to pay a dime. Not today, not when the trial expires, not a year from now to continue your maintenance contract.
  • That's right, it is free from now until the sun explodes (or at least until well beyond when anything we're building or planning to build today is long gone and forgotten)

Imagine the implications:

This year there is a separate subject area for Load Testing at CMG'10 (held December 6-10 in Orlando, Florida) in addition to the Performance Engineering subject area. The number of performance testing and performance engineering 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.

New version of Oracle Application Testing Suite 9.10 (former Emprix – now part of Oracle Enterprise Manager) was released recently. It is available for download (subject to OTN License). A lot of additional materials available (including webinars, white papers, etc.).

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) calls for papers and presentations for for CMG's 36th International Conference to be held in Kissimmee, Florida, December 6th through 10th, 2010. The 2010 CMG conference will cover all areas of systems management, including but not limited to: capacity planning, management and reporting, modeling and statistics, measurement, tuning, performance engineering and load testing, as well as the latest developments in the overall field of computer performance evaluation.