Performance Testing and Agile Projects: Recollections and Resources
It looks like testingreflections.com, where I had blogged for a while, doesn’t exist anymore. One more confirmation that you can’t rely on somebody else long-term – who knows what would happen… Well, I still have some drafts of my old posts. Here is what I wrote about agile performance testing in 2009:
Two Views of Agile Unit Testing reminded me (indirectly) the QAForums Agile Performance Testing – Oxymoron? discussion about agile development and performance testing some time ago
Well, if we talk about agile development I don’t see any problem with performance testing at all: you have a working build each iteration – you test it. What is a problem? It should be synonym, not oxymoron.
All issues mentioned in the discussion boil down to one: nobody wants to pay for it (so no testers, no equipment, etc). Don’t see anything especially agile in it. Maybe companies still don’t switch to agile development for major projects – and don’t want to spend money for minor projects. Another explanation may be that in most traditional projects performance testing happens at the very end instead of every iteration (so require less resources) – but it not the way to do it properly.
I see significantly more problems doing performance testing properly during traditional development. I wrote a paper that has the same title, Agile Performance Testing, but completely different content: how to do performance testing in an agile way for any kind of projects (where agile projects look rather like a trivial case for me).
Well, returning to the original question of the discussion, there are a few articles in the Internet about the subject:
Agile Performance Testing by Jamie Dobson
An Explanation of Performance Testing on an Agile Team Part 1 and Part2 by Scott Barber
Well, I still believe so. I still believe that performance testing in agile projects should be easier conceptually (although, of course, it would be a lot of technical difficulties – but who said that it should be easy?).
There are a few good newer articles addressing some aspects of the subject:
Top Ten Secret Weapons For Agile Performance Testing by Patrick Kua
Agile Performance Testing process AgileLoad whitepaper
Performance Testing in the Agile Enterprise by Scott Barber
Performance By Design – an Agile Approach by Jason Buksh
Still the subject is not covered much (and it looks like not actually practiced much – apart from involvement of traditional performance testing team in agile projects).
I started to prepare my talk for Belgium Testing Days (which promises to be a very interesting global testing conference) and the subject got me to very philosophical questions – will try to share my further thoughts about the subject in following posts.
