Over that past nine months or so, I have been learning the art performance testing. There is certainly lot more to it then mearly taking a load tool, pounding your web site with a couple hundred (or more) super users and waiting for the crash. There is planning what to test and what type of tests you need, determine usage habits, learning what tools are out there and how to use them effectively as well as understanding how to analyize all that data. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I am still a newbie as there is a lot to learn. However, here are my suggestions for getting started.

Read anything by you can get your hands on written by Scott Barber (http://www.perftestplus.com/scott_blog.php). Start with this one:

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications http://msdn2. microsoft. com/en-us/ library/bb924375 .aspx. It is a Microsoft document written by Scott Barber and others that gives a great overview of the process of performance testing. It is not technical and is not tool specific. It gives you an idea of the steps involved and things to plan for in your performance testing efforts.

Next, read this one:

User experience, not metrics http://www.ibm. com/developerwor ks/rational/ library/4228. html It goes deeper into performance testing. It is written around the IBM Rational toolset, however you can use the information against any performance toolset.

Then go to this one:

Beyond performance testing http://www.ibm. com/developerwor ks/rational/ library/4169. html

For books, I would recommend Performance Testing Microsoft .NET Web Applications by the Microsoft ACE team, especially if you are testing products developed using Microsoft tools. It is written around the older performance testing tools from Microsoft, but there is lots of good info.  There seem to be a couple other performance testing books out there, but I have not read them. As I do, I’ll post book reports.  A good book on statistics can hurt either.

Can anyone out there in the blogosphere comment on books you have read related to performance testing?

For tools, I would recommend playing around with the freely available tools out there.   For example:

Apache JMeter: http://jakarta. apache.org/ jmeter/

Radview Webload: http://www.webload. org/

The Grinder: http://grinder. sourceforge. net/

OpenSTA: http://opensta.org/

Also look at the pay-for tools. You may not use them, but get to know the products, what they do and how they do it. Some examples:

Borland Silk: http://www.borland. com/us/products/ silk/silkperform er/index. html

HP (Mecury) LoadRunner: https://h10078. www1.hp.com/ cda/hpms/ display/main/ hpms_content. jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-126- 17%5E8_4000_ 100__

Empirix ELoad: http://www.empirix. com/index. asp

IBM Rational Performance Tester: http://www-306. ibm.com/software /awdtools/ tester/performan ce/

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Systems Testers Edition: http://msdn2. microsoft. com/en-us/ vsts2008/ products/ bb933754. aspx

Happy testing,

Scott

Scott Schimanski Uncategorized Testing/QA