Stress, Load and Performance Testing in Quality Assurance

Next session is Stress, Load and Performance Testing in Quality Assurance by Goranka Bjedov of Google.

I have been wanting to hear Goranka for some time now as her sessions usually end up becoming the highlight of the event. For record, she passionately hates Power Point (I don't blame her).

I couldn't find a video of her Velocity talk but here is a video from her previous talk that's equally interesting.



Goranka spends all her time doing performance testing at Google. She tests Adwords, AdSense and hates any kinds of presentation tools.

• focus on the backend. Steve Souders is the client side performance guy.
• she works on the servers.
• what are the bottlenecks?
• QA people should be able to tell you what to expect.
• 2 purposes: what is going on in application? and monitor application for changes.
• a small code change can cause tremendous performance decline.
• first thing is if a mistake is made, everyone should know right away. Finding it later can cost a lot
• 80% of the performance problems can be worked out with one front end and one backend as long as you have the right database.
• figure out what is happenging with important transactions
• if you don't know what important transactions are, make a guess. it's better than nothing. don't be paralyzed, then worry about perfection
• there is nothing as perfection in performance testing. she cannot guarantee the exact results. All tests are run as statistical tests and run 5 times or so.
• big proponent of open source tools: jmeter, grinder and funkload. In Windows environment look at Open SDA.
• Vendor tools do reasonably job. (and solve the problem of having too much money)
• Open Source tools do exactly the same job. they are not free completely as time is required.
• if you're not willing to spend time on OS tool, then why even spend half a million dollars?
• she is happy that OS tools don't have monitoring built into it.
• monitoring is absolutely essential and must be done separately.
• for majority of things you can troubleshoot and benchmark within 3 weeks.
• check google blog for her posts: open source performance testing tools
  

Also see:

• Performance Testing: Blog post by Goranka Bjedov
• Google Testing Blog
• Optimizing Linux Performance by Ezolt