It has been long that I talked anything related to performance. Performance testing is one of the testing areas about which I am very passionate and I have been a dedicated performance tester for a quite good period of time.
I am going to take up a presentation on Brushing Up Performance Testing Basics for members of the STIG (Software Testing Interest Group), Bangalore – a group dedicated to knowledge sharing efforts for software testing professionals at Bangalore. It’s nice to be a part of such a non-commercial group comprising of software testers, to help the software testing community.
Click the image above to download the presentation in PPT format. You can also download the zipped version. The presentation is scheuled on Saturday, 15 Dec – 4 to 7 PM IST. If you are interested in attending it, please drop an email to get Venue details.
The presentation while discussing the basics, also leaves pointers to some innovative ideas e.g. WUS and UCML, by Alberto Savoia and Scott Barber respectively.
This seems to be a good start as I plan to write on the topic in decent detail in the near future. Though this presentation does not contain any definitions or descriptions, it would give you a picture about the day-to-day life of a performance tester, things he needs to focus on and his approach towards software testing.
I usually tend to talk much more than the contents of a presentation :-). If you are interested in having this presentation conducted for a team in your organization, please contact me.
Rahul Verma
coincidently, i am currently into an assignment which tests the performance of an application that is built across multiple platforms and multiple technologies.. due to lot of system constraints, doing a PT has become a challenge. will go through your presentation and see if it gives some insight! 🙂
Hi Rahul,
I hope the presentation helps. There are quite a few links on Performance Testing on my testing perspective website. You can try visiting this link.
This presentation talks about client-server application performance (the client might be a web browser i.e. the application might be a web application or a custom thick client). If you have a stand alone destop application in mind, then performance testing is a very subjective one.
Regards,
Rahul Verma.
Hi Rahul,
Thanks for the links, I’ll go through them.
The application under purview is very messy. Client Server model built on MVC STRUTS framework (so web app, 1 client-server combination). This talks to IBM WebSphere MQSeries, which is another client server model. Now this MQ server talks to MainFrame server, where in turn DB2 and VSAM are involved in form of two different apps.
So, 1 web app (STRUTS framework), 1 MQ middleware, 2 Mainframe applications are the ones under our PT scope!
Pretty hotchpotch!
Bests
Rahul
hi Rahul,
I have a doubt. If in a web application the url of the application contains the name of the methods (e.g. netAction.do etc…) is it termed as a security loophole? If yes, then how does it lead to security problems?
Bests
Rahul.
Hi Rahul,
I am not a core security guy to answer this question, but still I will try to express my opinion about it.
When you find something in the URL as net.do, it normally depicts the “action” part of the HTML form i.e. a program (server-side or client side), to which the form data is submitted.
Let’s take a practical example. Following is the URL of Registration page of Cisco website:
http://tools.cisco.com/RPF/register/register.do
You can find the method .do extension above and it depicts the register method to which the form data will be submitted, when you click the Submit button at the end.
Just showing this method in the URL may not be a security issue (although I understand that it gives the information that there is a program with the name register on the server/client side). I am not sure if one can really hide it in the URL, but to achieve the purpose, you will have to disable the “ViewSource” option also via some scripting (like JavaScript), so that Right Click is not enabled on the page or that the source that one sees does not contain the actual HTML.
In simple terms if I see the source of the Cisco Reigtration page by right clicking and then clicking “View Source”, somewhere in the code I get:
Now if you carefully see, the action attribute of the form tells you what exactly gets appended to http://tools.cisco.com base URL to get the final one as:
http://tools.cisco.com/RPF/register/register.do
So, the HTML source code also tells where the request will go once the Submit button is clicked.
I hope I answered your question or atleast gave something to think further about.
Regards,
Rahul Verma.
Rahul,
Can’t download the presentation. Can you please send that to my email address ?
Thanks for the blog. A great one for testers.
Thanks,
Gana
Hi Gana,
Thanks for showing interest in downloading the presentation.
You can now download it from: http://www.testingperspective.com/downloads/BrushingUpPTBasics.ppt
I will soon add a downloads page to the top navigation panel.
Regards,
Rahul Verma
Rahul,
Though you have not explicitly mentioned points like test data and parameterization (to avoid cached responses during tests) and capacity planning, I am sure you would have touched upon these during the actual presentation.
Overall, the presentation is useful and would come in handy in order to give an overview of performance testing to a test analyst.
Thank you!
Inder P Singh
Hi Inder,
This presentation was meant for an audience totally new to performance testing. The duration was 1 hour.
So, I had not touched on the topics that you have mentioned. As mentioned by you, Test Data Generation and Utilization, Maintaining Unique Logins, Sustained Logins, User Abandonment, Caching/No-Caching and its meaning in performance tests…..all these are real important stuff which a perf tester has to handle on job. Capacity planning is a much advanced concept which even goes beyond performance engineering which a regular performance testing assignment might involve. I have not worked much in the latter during my job assignments.
Including the above in a performance testing basics presentation would not be feasible, but they should definitely be discussed thereon and in extended sessions.
This presentation is far from being exhaustive even about performance testing basics. It was meant to be so 🙂
If you have some of your articles to share on the subject, I would be happy to host them on Testing Perspective.
Regards,
Rahul Verma.
Hello Rahul,
The link pointing to the PPT seems to be broken at time of writing this comment.
Please share the link which points to the resource.