Web Performance Matters

Your new Web application is almost ready to go live, but you need to be sure it will handle the projected traffic -- before that traffic hits the site. You probably already know that you can't just collect up your working test scripts and loop through them at high speed.

And just five minutes with Google should be enough to convince you that software performance testing is not a trivial matter.

So what should you do?

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What is performance testing? That seems like a silly question, doesn't it? I mean, we've all seen definitions for performance testing. We've conducted performance tests -- or been on projects where performance testing is conducted. But what is it really? And why is it that even when there seems to be obvious confusion about what performance testing is and is not, people seem hesitant to step back and ask What do you mean when you refer to performance testing?

I introduced the author of the paragraph above, Scott Barber, in my recent post here about Performance Engineering. The full article, What is Performance Testing?, contains some interesting observations.

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As a technical writer, my aim is not to publish a stream of original thoughts, but to sift, understand, highlight, explain, connect, and amplify the thoughts of others. So I'm always scouring the Web for good raw material.

Today I have added a new Recommendations page to the site. You'll find it listed in the sidebar, in the "related sites" section, just above the blogroll.

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Jonathan Kohl, is a consultant, author, and speaker who specializes in software testing. His blog, Collaborative Software Testing, includes many discussions of frameworks, heuristics, and mnemonics that serve as guides for different aspects of testing.

In particular, a November 2006 post on Modeling Web Applications presented a 9-part framework for testing Web applications and the associated mnemonic, FP DICTUMM.

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Most blog readers have now seen Tag Clouds. Technorati recently introduced a new widget that displays ... "your top tags with the Blog Top Tags in a beautiful cloud formation".

The trouble is, blogs come in all shapes and colors. So the size, shape, and colors of Technorati's standard tag cloud widget may neither look good, nor fit well, where you would like to display it in your blog's layout.

What can you do about that?

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Recent posts have discussed some insightful statements about the importance of measurements by Lord Kelvin, Grace Hopper, Tom DeMarco, and Tom Gilb.

In the last of these, I concluded that Gilb's observation (Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all) gets across the value of measurements without making any claims that are too far-reaching or contentious.

A follow-up comment and the ensuing conversation with Ben Simo -- author of Quality Frog, a blog about software testing and software quality -- reminded me of this post, which I'd been meaning to complete and publish for a while. I'll explain the reasons for the delay below.

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Performance testing is the discipline concerned with determining and reporting the current performance of a software application under various parameters. But there comes a time after the tests are run when someone who's reviewing the results asks the deceptively simple question: So what, exactly, does all this mean? This point beyond performance testing is where the capabilities of the human brain come in handy.

With these words, Scott Barber introduced a series of articles on IBM's DeveloperWorks site about the human aspects of performance testing.

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More site maintenance: I've added a blogroll section to the sidebar. It will not list every blog I might read, just those that may include posts related to Web performance.

Today [May 21, 2007] it contains links to the following blogs:

• Ajax Performance by Ryan Breen
• bitcurrent and Coradiant Blog by Alistair Croll
• Crazy Canuck Chronicles by Stephen Pierzchala
• Mobileslate by Eric Chan
• Webperformance@Peragro by Donald Foss
• Software Integrity by Nigel Cheshire
• Software Testing by Rahul Verma
• Testing Reflections by Antony Marcano
• TalkBMC: Adopting a Service (Management) Mentality by Peter Armstrong
• Technometria by Phil Windley

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Slow Motion Shopping?

I'm always on the lookout for interesting news about performance, so there isn't much that surprises me. But occasionally performance can mean something rather different from what I have in mind.

Last August, Ben Rushlo wrote about his recent experiences measuring some Online Retail sites, and the performance issues he uncovered. As summer approaches once more, most retailers are busy building and testing their 2007 holiday shopping sites.

Thinking about this, I was searching for articles about slow shopping performance. Among them I found this news item, which comes complete with video coverage. Slowness, it turns out, can be more fun that I ever imagined.

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Posts on The Importance of Measurements and Controlling Software Projects have reviewed the origin of the saying that "you can't manage what you can't (or don't) measure". Today I look more closely at its meaning and validity -- how true is it?

One apparent contradiction is that this much quoted fact of management is also widely viewed as a fallacy -- or at least, as an over-exaggerated claim -- especially by people in the software engineering profession, which seems (in the person of Tom DeMarco) to have coined the saying in the first place. That contradiction was highlighted in a 2003 book by Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering [Amazon].

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