36 | Performance Testing
something the functional testers
adopted many years ago which has
dramatically improved the quality of
applications: test earlier and test
more often.
It is our experience, across the
many hundreds of systems that we
have worked with our clients to test,
that the vast majority of application
performance and scalability problems
can be identified with a simulated load
of 100 concurrent users.
By providing development teams
with a simple mechanism to
performance test as they develop (and
no extra hardware is needed for 100
user load), performance problems can
be flushed out earlier. Not surprisingly,
developers usually jump at the
opportunity to be able to improve the
performance of their code.
Today, a new breed of much easier-
to-use, more intuitive, and far more
productive tools is now available.
These tools have been proven time
and again to test large organisations’
mission critical applications. Such
tools allow the performance tester
to focus on QA tasks (“What should
we test; what is ‘correct testing’ for
this application; are these results
acceptable ?”) and not spend 70
percent of their effort programming
test scripts.
True zero scripting testing
All the major tool vendors have
realised that their customers are
complaining about the complexity
of their tools, the fact that you often
need expensive external test script
‘consultants’ (programmers!), and that
all of this means that performance
testing takes a long time and costs a
lot of money.
Some tool vendors now claim
that 80 percent of the script is
automatically generated - which of
course sounds great. Sadly, in practise,
80 percent auto-generation can only
be achieved for simple test scripts. For
most test scripts, you still require the
tool expertise and considerable time
as you need to program the script
manually. Yet it is a start and these
vendors should be encouraged to do
more.
Other tools have for years claimed
‘no scripting’, fourth generation
languages, etc but have been
restrictive, have not allowed true
performance testing, or had back door
T.E.S.T | June 09 June 09 | T.E.S.T
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