A couple weeks ago, we looked at some of the best Web performance articles written in 2011. There was so much good material out there that we couldn't stop with just a single round-up!

Selecting Tools and Designing Tests

Jason at Performance Testing Professional published a couple of great guides last year on the subject of choosing the right testing framework to fit your company's needs. In his first article, Jason discussed some guiding principles for selecting a performance testing vendor. Most companies only adapt a performance testing framework after experience a major issue in production, so Jason gears several of his 11 questions towards investigating this instigating incident. His other questions focus on factors such as how your company plans to integrate performance testing into its existing QA cycle, and how often new system builds are deployed into production. He also lays out seven factors for making a final decision, including initial price, overall maintenance cost, and the platform's scripting capabilities and overall learning curve, among others.

Continuing his analysis in a separate article, Jason reviews the three major types of load testing platforms - freeware, commercial, and cloud-based - and discusses which tools tend to suit which types of projects. He also bemoans that no one has yet pulled together the existing open source tools into a freeware platform that provides a workable alternative to the commercial standards. (As we will see below, though, at least a few people are thinking about how to do this in the mobile performance space.)