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.

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

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.

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).