34 | Performance Testing
Don’t be a
testing tool junkie
With up to 70 percent of the effort for a performance test being
spent on scripting, performance consultant Graham Parsons says
it’s time to look at alternatives that allow you to focus on testing
and analysing results, and stop you becoming a tool junkie?
I
f you are involved in the performance tester’s time is spent on
performance testing discipline, you true QA tasks.
will no doubt have been faced with Organisations of all sizes are looking
IT managers pressing you to reduce for ways to save cost and generate
your effort and timescale estimates. more revenue. Business is putting
If you are such a manager, you are pressure on IT to cut costs, stop using
If anyone asked us in
probably still frustrated as to why this external consultants, yet at the same
another context if we
task takes so long, and why only a few time deliver quality systems in shorter
people, or expensive consultants, seem timescales.
agreed that developers
to be able to effectively drive the tools Providing estimates of three or four
and testers had different
required – which in themselves have weeks for performance testing at the
mindsets and abilities,
cost tens or hundreds of thousands of end of the project, and insisting that
would we disagree?
Euros to purchase. development is frozen whilst you are
testing, is even less palatable than it
Yet, we still ask our
Why does performance used to be. And if you are working in
performance testers to
testing take so long? an agile environment, you will already write programs for 70
Surveys of testing experts indicate have seen the ‘get with it’ looks when
percent of their time!
that, on average, approximately 10 you state performance testing will
percent of the overall effort is spent take longer than a few days!
on gathering the requirements and The reality is that performance
planning the tests, 70 percent on testers everywhere are being given
scripting and 20 percent on actually less time to confirm whether an
executing tests and analysing the application is fit for release.
results. We all know that ‘scripting’ It is clear that the majority of the
means programming. Therefore, effort is expended on creating test
on average, only 30 percent of the scripts, and this takes so much time
T.E.S.T | June 09 June 09 | T.E.S.T
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