It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?

This question was passed around internally last week: “Does anyone on this distribution list have a list of good reasons why a test environment should approximate that of production to provide accurate test results in lieu of using a cheaper, smaller test environment and math to estimate production-like results?” In my former career, we had… Continue reading It’s Late 2016, What’s the New Rule for Performance Test Environments?

Performance Assessment – Collaboration

Learn to Collaborate Communication breakdown is not unique to IT. Somehow, most IT organizations create towers. Maybe this happens to reduce the number of status meeting or to allow for a tree-shaped management chain. When leadership creates these separate teams, the intention is not to prevent the individual contributors from collaborating and working efficiently, but… Continue reading Performance Assessment – Collaboration

Using Modern Automated Testing Tools to Verify Mainframe and Midrange Batch Functions

Automated software quality (the process of having software test other software in an unattended fashion) has become a key player in the continued rollout of agile development processes whose target is “better software, faster.” Technical articles, open-source utilities, and licensed software solutions abound for desktop and server operating systems. But, what about classic System i… Continue reading Using Modern Automated Testing Tools to Verify Mainframe and Midrange Batch Functions

Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

As part of a workshop discussion someone posed the following example to our group of test professionals and asked how we would solve the following problems. I am paraphrasing. How do we insure data quality and integrity at the application programming interface (API) level in the new data warehouse? Note that the solution below is… Continue reading Data-Focused Test Strategy for New Data Warehouse

Intervention Coming for “I Hate Agile” Crowd

For all of the conferences held in agile’s honor, and the praise it gets from coaches, evangelists, and companies like Skytap, nobody calls it a silver bullet. But there’s one thing we all agree on—agile is very difficult. Whether looking at the culture change required, embracing the continuous integration, delivery and deployment of code, or… Continue reading Intervention Coming for “I Hate Agile” Crowd

Agile: Speed of Agile Barrier is as Real as the Sound Barrier

The Bell X-1 is the historic US plane credited for breaking the sound barrier.  The “sound barrier” is a term coined to represent the belief that man and aircraft could not travel faster than the speed of sound.  Stemming from the perception that drag (air-resistance and friction), which dramatically increases as you approach the speed… Continue reading Agile: Speed of Agile Barrier is as Real as the Sound Barrier

Steps to Implement a Java Selenium Automation Project: A Customer Story

Background In order to plug into the continuous delivery pipeline, one of our customers wanted us to implement an open source test automation solution from the ground up using Selenium WebDriver.  The customer had an existing automation framework that they were moving away from and we were given 2 weeks to get everything up and… Continue reading Steps to Implement a Java Selenium Automation Project: A Customer Story

Are Your Development and Testing Teams On the Same Page?

Traditionally, development and testing/QA teams have worked in isolation, with each group performing its respective tasks. Not only were they not on the same page, they weren’t even speaking the same language. Modern approaches such as Agile advocate for developers and testers to work in a more collaborative, closely synched environment. Companies that have achieved… Continue reading Are Your Development and Testing Teams On the Same Page?

Understanding Performance of PayPal as a Service (PPAAS)

By Steve Sturtevant, Sales Engineer at AppDynamics In a previous post – Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance – I discussed some of the challenges faced in managing a successful performance engineering practices in an Agile development model.  Let’s continue this with a real world example, highlighting how AppDynamics simplifies the collection and comparison… Continue reading Understanding Performance of PayPal as a Service (PPAAS)

Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance

Just in case you haven’t heard, Waterfall is out and Agile is in.  For organizations that thrive on innovation, successful agile development and continuous deployment processes are paramount to reducing go to market time, fast tracking product enhancements and quickly resolving defects. Executed successfully, with the right team in place, Agile practices should result in… Continue reading Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance