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.

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) calls for papers and presentations for CMG's 35th International Conference to be held in Dallas, Texas, December 6th through 11th, 2009. Mentoring is available!

Since 1975 CMG is a volunteer organization of performance professionals and the CMG conference is the best place to learn about capacity planning and performance analysis. This year CMG has Performance Engineering and Load Testing subject area, so the program in these areas should be strong too.

It is still not late to submit a paper to the CMG conference. Although the abstract deadline passed, the enforced deadline is only the paper deadline – June 13.

I believe that it is the best conference about computer performance. Conference proceedings from 1997 through 2005 are available to the public – probably the largest collection of performance-related papers (and most of them are practical).

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.

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

Can't leave Ainars Galvans' posting unanswered. I think that it touches very important issues I am fighting for long time with, so this post is going beyond just a comment.

It is very interesting that I completely agree with Ainars on most items except final conclusions – which I completely disagree with. I suspect that it is rather terminology difference. So let's start with what I disagree.

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) is making its conference proceedings from 1997 through 2005 available to the public. I believe that CMG holds the best practical conference in performance analysis, capacity planning, and related areas. In addition to the areas listed below, I'd definitely add performance testing. Here is the official mail CMG sent: