Reinventing Performance Testing: Introduction

I am looking forward to share my thoughts on ‘Reinventing Performance Testing’ at the imPACt performance and capacity conference by CMG held on November 7-10, 2016 in La Jolla, CA. I decided to publish a few parts here to see if anything trigger a discussion.

It would be published as separate posts:
-Introduction (this post – a short teaser)
–Cloud
–Agile
–Continuous Integration
–New Architectures
–New Technologies

As the industry is changing with all these modern trends, performance testing should change too. A stereotypical, last-moment performance validation in a test lab using an expensive record-playback load testing tool is not enough anymore.

Cloud practically eliminated the lack of appropriate hardware as a reason for not doing load testing and significantly decreased cost of large-scale tests. Now having a test lab is an option.

Agile development eliminated the main problem of traditional development: you need to have a working system before you may test it. While it was always recommended to start performance testing early, it was rather few activities you can do before the system is ready. Now, with agile development, we got a major “shift left”, allowing to start testing early indeed.

In agile development / DevOps environments performance testing should be interwoven with the whole development process, not just an independent step in the software development life-cycle when you get the system shortly before its release.

Cloud and virtualization brought new dynamic architectures that drastically change the way we monitor and analyze data. New technologies may require other ways to generate load.

Performance testing should reinvent itself to become a flexible, context- and business-driven discipline. It is not that we just need to find a new recipe – it looks like we would never get to that point again – we need to adjust on the fly to every specific situation to remain relevant.