LoadStorm™
In the past, I was a Microsoft guy. Going all the way back to 1983 when I was working for a small company in Nashville where we hooked a Corona PC with DOS 1.0 to a Ricoh laser printer through a Black Box for desktop publishing. DOS 1.0 was my slave. I knew every command and every switch to make it do exactly what I wanted.
I built EDI systems on a room full of 386 machines, 1200 baud modems, and Microsoft Windows 3.11. The MS FoxPro apps we created turned into separated tiers of architecture with SQL Server, C++, and NT servers.
We all know how critical load testing is to a successful development effort … underestimate the possible success of your site, and you may have sabotaged that very success! If you are looking into simulated virtual user load testing for the thorough, comprehensive analysis it can offer developers, here we have some tips and tricks to make the process easier and faster.
Recognize that some questions cannot be answered
I enjoyed the CAST2009 event last week. It was interesting and helpful. Although the conference was not focused on load testing, there were sessions specific to performance testing.
There were very bright testing professionals from all over the world speaking and informally sharing their experience throughout the event.
I received an email today from Jim Seward, New Media Executive with Version One a document management company in the United Kingdom. Jim said he got some good information from the LoadStorm blog concerning cloud computing for their research, and they produced an article to address the confusion.
On behalf of everyone involved here at LoadStorm, we want to thank all of our customers that have used our system for load testing web applications and web sites.
We have crossed a milestone today:
800 LoadStorm Customer Accounts!
I enjoy helping people. It is fun to answer questions from developers that have never performance tested their web apps. And of course, I thoroughly enjoy hearing from others about lessons they learned (usually the hard way) from load testing their websites.
The following is an interview with Ryan Cramer, the CEO of RCD, LLC in Atlanta. Ryan specializes in design and development of medium-to-large scale web sites and web applications, and we are grateful he has shared his thoughts with us regarding software testing.
What is your technical background?
On Tuesday, the Colorado chapter of SIM (Society for Information Management) had a panel discussion on Cloud Computing. I was asked to serve on the panel and thoroughly enjoyed the event.
I could write up a summary, but Julie Bort did a fine job in her article
Cloud computing is cheaper, greener but not yet enterprise ready.
Some of the benefits of load testing are:
- Reduce risk of downtime
- Improve deployment quality
- Find performance bottlenecks
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Provide tangible statistics to developers
- Create system benchmarks useful throughout SDLC
- Improve scalability of your app
- Minimize risk related to performance requirements
- Reduce costs of failure
- Maximize marketing campaign funds
- Optimize hardware and software costs through accurate capacity metrics
- Reduce risk associated with SLAs
On Monday March 30, I left home at 3:00 a.m. bound for the Denver International Airport. It was snowing hard, and the gusty wind made visibility difficult. Load testing waits for no man. My passion for LoadStorm forced me out into the blizzard.
Jethro Larson is a website designer/developer for Auctiva Corp. Jethro is a self-declared standards evangelist and user experience advocate. He strives for good UI, good code, and easy maintenance.
For more sources on Jethro, please visit:
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. 🙂
My thanks to Lawrence Nuanez for sharing his insights and testing expertise with us. In this email interview, Lawrence talks about his views on software testing, load testing, test automation, and off-shoring.
As a Senior Consultant for ProtoTest, Lawrence’s focus is mainly on load and performance testing, and he has several years of experience helping both SME and Fortune 500 clients by designing custom test plans. Use of both proprietary and open-source tools is always considered to ensure that best fit for the customer.
I found a blog post on linux.com entitled, Using Open Source Software for HTTP Load Testing, but I can’t find supporting explanation of the primary premise: there are only 5 legitimate tools. Here is what I do see:
A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load.If you leave out the load-testing packages that are no longer
Bob Williams, Senior Manager e-Commerce Marketing at Harland Clarke, has a nice post about performance testing, load testing, and stress testing. He titles it Customer focused eCommerce: Volume testing techniques
Dr. J Singh is a principal of Quantitecture where he helps clients improve the success rate of large software development projects. Dr. Singh has been associated with system performance for 20+ years, and was the Director of Software Development at Fidelity Investments. He managed a system performance group and created several successful new products.
I have been reading a classic book in our industry: The Art of Software Testing by Glenford Myers. It has a copyright of 1979, so it is celebrating its 30 year anniversary. That’s 300 years old in Internet years. It was revised about 5 years ago to include updated material on software testing tools, web applications, and newer methodologies (e.g. XP). Unfortunately, I only have the original.
This announcement may be slightly premature, but Hannah Price is predicted to be a World Cup Alpine Skiing champion by 2019. She is being followed closely by the Colorado media because of her outstanding talent and physical strength. At 16 years old, Hannah is 6’2″ and 175 pounds of athletic prowess.
Hannah is in Aspen this week competing at the USSA SUREFOOT COLORADO SKI CUP – Downhill.
This is the third installment of an email interview with James Christie, software testing professional from Scotland. In the first part, James talks about his views on usability testing. In the second part he discusses leaders in usability testing, KPIs, test automation tools, cloud computing, and testing blogs.
James mainly discusses load testing in this last post. It’s my favorite segment. 😉
What would you say is the difference between load testing and performance testing?
I’d say performance testing is a general term that covers load testing too. Performance testing is a rather vague term covering response times and the application’s ability to cope with heavy loads. Load testing is a more specific term. I think of it as a technique to allow you to carry out performance testing effectively. You either work your way up through a series of load levels establishing how the application performs, or hit it with the maximum loads it will have to cope with (plus a bit more to allow a margin for error).
This is the second installment of an email interview with James Christie, independent software testing consultant and owner of Claro Testing Ltd. In the first part, James talks about his views on usability testing, and in this second part he discusses leaders in usability testing, KPIs, test automation tools, cloud computing, and testing blogs.
Living in Scotland, James has worked with large global organizations such as IBM, and he provides consulting services as leader of Claro Testing Ltd. His consulting includes setting testing strategy and budget, writing test plans, supervising test execution. and creating testing processes.
Who are the top 3 usability testing experts that you know? No need to list yourself, that is a given.