When most people think of performance testing, they think about the hard parts – the very hard parts. They think about the expensive and complicated tools that are required to simulate the activity of thousands of end-users all at the same time, while collecting tens or hundreds of thousands of measurements.
In reality, many performance issues can be detected and diagnosed with exactly the tools and knowledge you already have at your disposal using information obtained from quick, easy and cheap performance tests. In fact, much of the performance related information that stakeholders need to make good decisions and development teams need to dramatically improve system performance is easily obtainable by the performance-testing layman. The trick is knowing what performance tests to apply when, and how much time/effort is worth investing based on the business importance of performance — in other words, context!
In this hands-on tutorial (bring your laptop or risk reduced value and intermittent boredom), Scott Barber will introduce you to several techniques that the performance testing layperson can use to speed up and simplify the collection of valuable performance-related information; many of which you can use during the tutorial to test your current website if it’s accessible from the classroom. You’ll also receive an introduction to the ‘rocket science’ side of performance testing along with some things that you can do to make life easier for your resident ‘performance testing rocket scientist’.