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.

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.

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!

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?

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
  

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:

Jethro's blog

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.

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

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 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).