The following is an interview with Dr. J Singh, and he shares his thoughts with us on software testing.

Dr. J Singh is a principal of Quantitecture and 20+ year veteran with extensive experience with system performance. Dr. Singh has served as a technology leader at several companies, including the Director of Software Development at Fidelity Investments. He is a wise, yet humble, man that prefers to be called J rather than Dr. Singh. Being a lifelong basketball fan, I would prefer to call him Dr. J. :)

We extend our thanks to Dr. J for his willingness to invest his time answering these questions for us and providing his insights into system performance. Here is the interview:

What is your technical background?

Engineer by training, PhD in Electrical Engineering. I've been involved with system performance for 20 years. My passion is System Architecture, as the name Quantitecture suggests.

Do you consider yourself more of a software developer or QA professional?

Development manager and Architect. I've run projects that included requirements, development as well as QA.

When and why did you get into this industry?

Because it is fun! I still can't believe they pay me for this. But seriously, I love the constant flow of new ideas and interacting with very smart people.

What do you believe to be the most critical elements of web application testing? Why?

Can I mention 2?

(1) It's all in the workload. You have to think through the business and come up with workloads that are representative of how the system will be used. Otherwise, it's Garbage In Garbage Out.

(2) Interpreting the results for clients. I have seen (and done too, I'll admit) presentations full of pretty graphs that don't mean much to clients. I mean, if they wanted to look at art, they would go to the Louvre. They are listening to you because their business depends on it. Give them the answers in a form that means something to them: dollars, dates, deliverables.

How do you see development or testing evolving over the past few years? the next few years?

See my blog post: Trends in Load and Performance Testing

Any thoughts on how the global economic downturn will specifically affect the application development and testing business? (e.g. less testing, more offshoring, etc.)

Some of our clients are already saying they can't afford to performance test every release like they used to. Taking on a bit more risk with this decision. They might try offshoring but it's a tricky business -- the real value is in being aligned with the business objectives and that's hard to offshore.

Do you see much difference in load testing for web applications versus traditional software?

Yes, web applications are much more distributed than traditional software ever was. The interfaces are less varied -- it's something-over-http.

Do you feel like load testing is an accepted critical part of the development life cycle?

Critical part but not in the critical path. The fact that results become available so late in the cycle is a real issue. We did a survey last year and found an astonishing number of projects fail due to performance reasons. I'm not saying load testing would have redeemed them but it might have avoided the "Oops factor".

Please share with us an interesting story about your experience with software development or load testing.

Not sure it's interesting, but it talks to one of the pitfalls: we used to do performance testing on a shared, underpowered server and correct for the differences between it and the production server. During our testing, one of the jobs that usually took 2 hours on the production server took 8 hours on the test server.

It was OK, there was that much difference between the two environments, but one of the business users heard the number and panicked. All of a sudden, everyone up to the CEO is involved, OMG the business is going down the tubes, Technology is hiding the bad news, ... you get the picture.

What are your favorite testing or development blogs?

Connie Smith's web site about Software Performance Engineering. The link takes you to an ongoing series of posts on her web site.

This is my favorite post: Performance Assurance for IT Systems: A Cynic’s Brief Collection of Dos and Don’ts. I know it's not a blog but it's what came to mind first.

If you could make a career from one of your favorite hobbies, what would it be?

With a career like this one, who needs hobbies?