Geometric Value in Continuous Integration

One of the most important measurements in software development is related to the defect queue. I don’t mean simply the count of defects. A queue has a depth, latency, service time and throughput. The depth is the count of issues assigned to a team or person. The latency tells you how long an issue sits… Continue reading Geometric Value in Continuous Integration

Creating Successful Requirements for Performance and Scalability from Subjective Goals

Whenever I work on a performance problem, I need a maturity assessment of the existing requirements. A great place to start is characterizing the performance issues from the stakeholders. Let’s separate this into three archetypes to guide the discussion: Subjective, Low Precision, and Monitored. For each of these, I will try to describe some patterns… Continue reading Creating Successful Requirements for Performance and Scalability from Subjective Goals

A Tale of Two Sites…

As a software quality assurance professional with over 15 years’ experience in the field, I was initially shocked by the technical problems with healthcare.gov.  I’ve devoted a large portion of my professional career towards ensuring that things like this never happen to my customers!  However, after much thought, I realized that the ramifications of bad… Continue reading A Tale of Two Sites…

Repeatable and Trustworthy

These are key tenets of any enterprise testing organization but too often the testing teams are at the mercy of the hardware, operating system and middleware configuration of their system under test environments. How can the testing professionals really do their job without a clean and well controlled laboratory? They are mixing chemicals in dirty… Continue reading Repeatable and Trustworthy