Jason Buksh is a Technical Project Manager and Performance Consultant in London, England. Jason has extensive experience with performance testing at many companies including HSBC and Siemens. He is skilled with tools such as Rational, Grinder, and Performance Studio. His certifications include LoadRunner.
We appreciate his time to share some good thoughts with us about a topic that gets us excited. Here is his interview with us.
What is your technical background?
I learned to program when I was 13 – it was a vic20, I then swiftly moved onto 6502 for the BBC micro. University studying computer science was an obvious and easy progression for me. First job was writing rendering engines (C++) for virtual reality simulators. I would describe myself as a techie at heart – I’m genuinely interested in how things work. I think having a strong and long background in IT enables me to grasp new concepts easily – which is great when I have to go into different companies and need to understand their systems quickly. I’ve a 2:1 in Computer Science, ISEB Practitioner and SCRUM Master Certified.
Do you consider yourself more of a software developer or QA professional?
We should get out of the habit of separating them so readily. I feel strongly that every software developer should QA their work. Its not good enough to code and then relinquish QA to another team. Its lazy, increases delivery time, wastes effort and increases cost. Everyone should be a QA professional within their own field. I think a large dedicated QA team is a good measure to the inefficiency of an IT project. I’m going to write a post on this very topic.
How much involvement do you have with load and performance testing?
My career is built on it. I’ve performance tested many mission critical and highly transactional systems. Companies like Expedia have extremely large volumes of traffic, and the performance of such a system is paramount. My experience at global financial institutions has taught me a great deal about trading platforms and the importance of milliseconds in response time.
What is the biggest change you have witnessed in the way people conduct load testing?
There is a quiet move away from Loadrunner and its going to become an avalanche. It’s been underdeveloped and overpriced for a long time.
Basilio Briceno is the Senior Developer at Naranya – one of the leading new media companies in LatinAmerica, with special focus in the mobile entertainment and mobile marketing world. He is also a Community Member of the Mozilla Foundation and Project Lead at Tlalokes PHP framework.
Basilio is or has been a college professor, a public speaker, and an independent consultant with these specialties: PHP, UNIX, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Apache, IIS, Bind, Bash, Photoshop, Gimp, (X)HTML, DB/2, Websphere, JSP, JSF, Javascript, MySQL, Oracle, Perl, PostgreSQL, Postfix, and XML. Check out his personal blog site when you get a chance.
Let’s start the interview.
How much involvement do you have with load and performance testing?
That’s what I do everyday, and that’s why companies hire me. My principal task is to be the most worried person in the company about performance testing. That’s why I try to be involved in every aspect, from UI testing, to load testing, and OS tuning.
What would you say is the difference between load testing and performance testing?
To put it into a boxing metaphor, performance testing allows us to know the precision and speed of the fighter’s arms and fists, the power of his punches, the resistance, velocity and movement of his legs. Load Testing allows you to know the amount of rounds the fighter is capable of competing.
What do you think is the most important aspect of load testing?
Emulating the real conditions that the application is going to be exposed to and exceeding the expectations. If the Load Testing results are superior to expectations, it is less likely that uncomfortable surprises will appear in production.
Joe Emison is the VP of Technology at BuildFax. He is also the Chief Systems Architect at BUILDERadius. A world-class multi-tasker, Joe lives in Ashville, North Carolina.
Joe has experience with load and performance testing, and we are grateful he invested his time to share some good thoughts with us about a topic we are excited about.
On an interesting note, Joe is also a JD graduate from Yale Law School. How many alpha geeks do you know that went to law school? It’s a rare breed that only the folks at LoadStorm can hunt down. 😉
Let’s start the interview.
Please share one tip or best practice that is important to you regarding performance (or load) testing or engineering?
Before you start, you need to understand how everything works. Down to this level of detail:
- How many queries does your application make to the database for different activities?
- How many connections should your application make to the database server?
- How much memory should your application be using?
Otherwise, you won’t know how to use the results of load testing.
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Will Wolff-Myren is a software professional that loves building web applications. He has a blog with technical articles that are usually centered around developing on a Microsoft platform.
Will is a Software Engineer working for about the last 5 years at Learning.com. He is a fan of Firebug and Charles. He identifies some good links and useful books with us too. We appreciate Will taking the time to share some information with us.
What is your technical background?
I’ve had a variety of experience in web design/development and software engineering, starting with my first experiences in Java programming (all the way back in Java 1.2), and leading me to my current position as an ASP.NET software engineer.
Do you consider yourself more of a software developer or QA professional?
I consider myself to be much more of a software developer, though, of course, I try to do as much QA on my own code as I can before delivering it to our QA team for further review.
A couple of months ago, Adron and I connected on Twitter. He fits the perfect profile of people I like in social media: a web developer, software architect, cloud computing advocate, public speaker, adrenaline junkie that is into heavy metal, transit & logistics, economics, and beautiful things. He also believes that load testing is often overlooked and performance can make or break a project (see below).
Andrew Lombardi is a Java Software Engineer and Head Geek of Mystic Coders, LLC in Santa Ana, California. His blog provides insight into many aspects of technology.
Our thanks to Andrew for taking the time to share some information with us.
Ricardo Sueiras is a self-professed “IT professional and geek” (found that on his blog. His formal title is J2EE Systems Architect at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Canterbury, United Kingdom.
Ricardo has extensive experience with web performance and load testing, and we are grateful he invested his time to share some good thoughts with us about a topic we are excited about.
What is your technical background?
I am a system architect, working in J2EE for around 10 years, with a focus on infrastructure design and architecture.
Do you consider yourself more of a software developer or QA professional?
Neither I guess – I am the guy that has to put all the pieces together, make sure it all works and performs as required. When it doesn’t, I figure out why and what needs to be done!
When and why did you get into this industry?
I’ve been in IT for over 20 years as it has always been a passion – it is hard to think of any other industry to be in for me, and am still as interested and driven as when I started 20 years ago. I think its IT’s ability to evolve, change and for new technologies to come along that help keep it fresh and interesting.
What is your specialty? Why?
I tend to specialise in open source and collaboration/social software. I have implemented over a period of years a robust process within our organisation for the adoption of open source tools, platforms and software and am heavily involved in collaboration software, initially with the first wave (cc:Mail/Lotus Notes) and now onto the new wave of social collaboration tools. I am also interested in load testing, and have worked on load testing a number of our internal web infrastructures and applications.
The following is an interview with David Makogon, and he shares his thoughts with us on load testing.
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.
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.
I recently found and joined The Software Testing Club, an online community of software testers. The site has some very good video interviews of leaders in the industry.