Today we held our first chapter meeting of 2017. A brief pre-meeting with various key members decided this was a great year to touch on performance. We started off with a brief overview of some elements of performance: types of testing, tooling available and the purpose of each, and the eventual evolution of performance testing to performance engineering. (I need to give credit to the PE evolution slide to Todd DeCapua) As a group we learned that teams were at various stages in their journey through performance: figuring out requirements / building scripts for core applications / testing releases / measuring responses and creating feedback loops.
As to not volunteer or put anyone on the spot I created a survey to observe where individuals were in regards to various key components of performance. (I will leave this survey open so anyone can still weigh in) Survey found here We found that both locally and in the community which took the survey a trend was present on the maturity / distance of journey that folks were on. Please feel free to reference the attached PDF for results.
I'll touch on two questions.
Where do your requirements for scenarios come from?
This is very important so that we are aware of 'are we testing accurately'. The majority of those who attended the live session today said that their scenarios come from the business / departmental procedures. This is a great way to leverage work that teams / business units have already done documenting 'what happens'. These can easily be turned into great performance scenarios to drive your applications. Eventually you may evolve to actual performance requirements (or maybe not...)
How often do you run performance testing?
This is a very tricky question. Several folks voted 'on demand' while others voted on a release by release basis. Our community survey had a variety of responses. I find that setting a goal of frequency of performance testing can be key to understanding your application and eventually how your end users' experience will be.
Feel free to browse the attached slide deck for more survey results!
Where will we go next?
I'm leaving this decision up to the members of the chapter. Considering many attendees are in the healthcare arena, there was a common theme of "How do I make my complex tests repeatable?" which we may try to tackle. A general desire to learn more both with interfacing with other groups such as the business and operations / as well as Tips & Tricks.
Stay tuned for more information about our upcoming sessions! As always, please feel free to send us notes and thoughts about what would serve you best.
Thank you chapter members for making this yet another great Western NY Vivit Chapter event !!
