CustomerCentrix

Someone once said that there is no such thing as bad publicity. That sound pithy, but I can't buy it. Take for instance the negative press Bank of America is getting from their website woes.

Several articles and several "experts" are saying publicly that they believe this to be the work of hackers. A distributed denial of service attack is possible, however no one has taken credit for it and no one has proven it is hacker-related.

The indisputable point I get from this episode:

When your site is slow, people get angry.

A picture is worth a thousand words. This comes from Dave McClure's blog (http://500hats.typepad.com/). See the connection between hiring good, talented people and making money as an entrepreneur?

I think we have proven this at CustomerCentrix over the past 14 years. Over and over again.

CustomerCentrix is working on the release of LoadStorm 2.0. The key upgrade features for our load testing tool include:

• Script proxy recorder

• RIA interface

The proxy recorder will be a new way to build testing plans. The current method of scenarios/steps will be replaced by turning on a recorder, clicking around, entering data, acting like a user on your website, and LoadStorm will record the requests for these actions. The requests will be interpreted into a script for you. These of course can then be replayed as the actions users take in the load test.

Here is a page that contains links and excerpts from various articles about performance test subjects - including performance tuning.

• Load testing vs. performance testing

• SearchSoftwareQuality.com Testing for performance - parts 1, 2, 3
• Performance testing according to the Google test blog
• Simple and effective performance tips
• Web performance bottlenecks
• Performance tuning tips

There are several good posts about why people should tune their apps. Lots of other good places to find info on HOW to tune.

Web performance tuning does a great job of using case studies and research by the big companies to prove the correlation between web performance and profit. It's obvious - slow pages make users go away; thus, revenue is lost.

Top Ten Web Performance Tuning Tips
by Patrick Killelea, author of Web Performance Tuning is a good read for ideas. Patrick rightly points out that too many times performance testing is overlooked.

Load test fundamentals usually only talk about the technical aspects, but this post lists several outstanding questions that should be asked up front to understand the who, what, when, why, and how of load testing.

Load tests are difficult to get just right because there are so many variables. But if you don't clearly define the measurements of success before you start, then I guarantee that some manager somewhere is going to be mad. And of course, blame rolls down hill.

So begin your load testing process with getting the right context.

On May 26, Alois Reitbauer wrote a post about Is There a Business Case for Application Performance? Alois quotes some interesting statistics from a dynaTrace study that show performance management is not a high priority in most companies.

• 6o percent of the companies admit that they do not have any performance management processes installed or what they have is ineffective.

• Half of the companies who answered that they have performance management processes admitted that they are doing it only in a reactive way when problems occur.
  

In life, I've found that much of failed communication is due to the misunderstand of what someone means when they use a particular word or phrase. Bill Clinton exemplified this fact when he asked his impeachment questioners to define "is". Oh boy.

Many application developers use the term performance testing to mean different things. So here are some great sources for defining what is meant by performance testing in the context of software applications.

performance testing definitions

wikipedia defines performance testing

I did a Google search on "performance testing statistics" and was disappointed by what I found. It seems that most of the results are about tools gathering data during the test. I was hoping to find out more about how the industry of load and performance testing compiles information on a macro level.

Here is the best source I found on performance testing statistics that relate to how companies use application performance management. Especially useful are the statistics around how performance affect customers and impact revenue.

ALM has always been one of those acronyms I hear and immediately tune out. In banking, it means Asset Liability Management. In programming world, it stands for Application Lifecycle Management. So what does that mean?

Matt Heusser offers a good description in his article posted on March 1, 2010 on SearchSoftwareQuality.com:

For our purposes, let's call ALM "Any tools, technologies, or techniques that attempt to connect and maintain connections between activities over the life of a piece of software – from the first glint in the glimmer of an executive's eye, through system retirement." Notice I said attempt. It turns out that many of the important facts about a software project are never written down, and that even those that are can be misinterpreted and misunderstood. The typical project is actually a collection of ideas held in the minds of the people on the project; compressing that into relevant bits of unambiguous code will work, but English is interpreted.