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Smarter Simulations in Performance Testing

In my introduction to performance testing I mentioned two problems that stand in tension of each other. On one hand, you might make testing appear too simple. At the extreme end, this is just hitting a static web page frequently, and never actually hitting the parts of the website that require database lookups. The performance test

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How to Start Performance Testing

Sometimes when people talk about a discipline, they make it harder than it needs to be.  This does not have to be on purpose.  When the aspiring performance tester starts out, they have to read a bunch of documentation, thick books with big words, and, frankly, figure out what works by trial and experiment.  As

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A Test Scaling Story

Previously I explored what the word scaling means and in particular what it might mean for you and your organization. My short explanation is to allow testing to continue to “work,” without introducing delays, excessive effort, or problems, as something gets bigger. What that thing is depends on your group. It could be more features, more teams,

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What does it Mean to Scale Test Automation?

In computer science we have two kinds of scaling. In horizontal scaling, where we add more machines to a cluster to serve many clients at the same time. With vertical scaling we “beef up” the machines we have, adding more powerful CPU, more RAM, or faster hard drives. In Software Engineering, scaling can also mean

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Where do you Start Building your Testing Program?

Exactly what to do in your test program is context-dependent. Don’t take this as the way to create a test program, but instead as one way, a way I have seen work at several companies, paying less for testing and getting better results than their peers. Some of the readers here won’t really have a test “program,” not

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How Do You Measure Quality, Anyway?

A few years ago I worked with a team implementing a continuous integration system. The system was pretty simple. It checked out the code and ran unit-tests, then waited an hour to run again. The manager counted not only the number of passing assertions per day, but also the growth rate. Of course, some programmer

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Subject7 Unveils Universal Runner

One of the barriers to organizations embracing Codeless Test Automation has been the lingering question of how to manage legacy tests written in other testing frameworks. For most organizations, that means Selenium. The prospect of recreating thousands of Selenium tests, even using a codeless solution, is understandably daunting and has been a barrier to many

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Rethinking the Testing Pyramid

Early in my career I read an incredible book that filled me with hope about software. The book is called Peopleware, it is thirty-three years old and still in print. A highlight of my career has been working in a small way with Tim Lister, one of the co-authors. The other co-author is Tom Demarco,

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Starting Points for Test-Automation

Retrofitting a test automation tool on top of an existing application is no joke. As Fred Brooks puts it in the software engineering classic The Mythical Man Month, many a dinosaur has died in those tar pits. Unlike the dinosaurs of old, we keep re-creating the problem with automation projects. Even if we start the development

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New Tech has made Test Re-Use a Reality

You hear it at the conference, in the session with the performance consultant. It all sounds so helpful. She points out that you already have functional test automation. Those run through realistic scenarios, end to end. So put them on a grid, maybe in the cloud, then use them as the basis of your load

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