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Performance & scalability issues observed due to non-optimized XMLs

Performance & scalability issues observed due to non-optimized XMLs

XMLs are extensively used components while coding an application especially when it comes to .NET applications. It not only is used to pass key data items across application layers, but is also used to represent message payload for web services. Its flexibility and ease of use makes is one of the favorites for many. In […]
Distributing load across key performance scenarios

Distributing load across key performance scenarios

While designing a performance test, it is extremely important to understand which of the all business scenarios the test should include. While doing so, the load subjected on and the criticality of each those scenarios need to be considered. This is not an easy job and exhaustive discussion need to happen between the business teams, […]
Reaping the benefits of effective requirement gathering in AGILE

Reaping the benefits of effective requirement gathering in AGILE

Requirement gathering is one of the key steps when it comes to any project management and IT project management is no exception to it. Requirements are generally visualized by functional experts and it is the responsibility of IT managers to convert those visual aspirations to appropriate designs and document those in understandable forms. This is […]
Scrum meetings – Do you feel it’s a pain?

Scrum meetings – Do you feel it’s a pain?

Scrum is one of the most adopted AGILE methodologies in the industry. Scrum practitioners are also very active when it comes to organizing conferences, sharing knowledge and helping fellow practitioners in the industry. It is one of the most rapidly evolving methodologies. Experiences have shaped some best practices which many practitioners promote. Frequent scrum-meeting is […]
Principles behind AGILE manifesto

Principles behind AGILE manifesto

Agile is the one of the latest hits in the software development industry and it has turned the industry around. It has been gaining popularity for quite some time now and more and more teams and organizations are moving away from traditional approaches and are adopting Agile. Agile brings in effectiveness, reduces wastage and improves […]
Traditional Vs AGILE documentation

Traditional Vs AGILE documentation

It is said that Agile document is ‘just barely good enough’ and is produced ‘just in time’ and with ‘just the optimally right amount of content’. Less documentation and time spent in it saves project cost however this shouldn’t come at the cost of increased project risk of not documenting essentials. In this article we […]
Scrum Vs Kanban

Scrum Vs Kanban

Scrum and Kanban are both widely used methodologies in AGILE. Practitioners of both speak a lot on the positives of the respective methodologies and share success stories. People often try to evaluate the two and make a judgment about which one is better. In this article I have tried to discuss some visible differences between […]
Extracting Information from the web logs

Extracting Information from the web logs

Every team wants to reproduce a production like performance test so as the produce the maximum number of issues as could be observed in production environment. Running a production like performance test is as if every performance test manager’s dream. But it is no cake walk. To execute such a test, a lot of factors […]
Scaling up or scaling out

Scaling up or scaling out

To manage the increasing load / performance requirements, many times scaling the infrastructure become an essential activity. This scale up can be achieved through two options Scale up: Increasing the capabilities of existing infrastructure and system Scale out: Increase the number of boxes / servers in the system (or infrastructure) While designing the application and […]
How to – Specialize and become expert in Performance testing

How to – Specialize and become expert in Performance testing

Speed has become one of the differentiating factors for business and each business wants to drive users towards it. Without speed, users don’t prefer to re-visit the site / app. Performance hence has become an extremely important attribute to be desired. This is the reason why performance testing is increasing across the globe. It is […]
Thinking Lean

Thinking Lean

While in AGILE, you must think of improvement in efficiency and reduction in wastage. Yes the wastage is in the form of human efforts that may get wasted re-working on a piece of code / while developing a functionality that will eventually never be used. These ideas and many others as are adopted in Agile […]
Ideas to improve documentation in AGILE

Ideas to improve documentation in AGILE

“AGILE isn’t about documentation” I am sure many amongst you must have heard it. Believe me, it’s not the truth. There are many documents required to be created as a part of project management in AGILE. Product owners and scrum masters are the ones who primarily work on the documentation related tasks. But it is […]
Some key (yet funny) terminologies in AGILE Scrum

Some key (yet funny) terminologies in AGILE Scrum

Agile has been the buzz word of the industry since 4-5 years now. It has turned around many businesses. It has not just drastically changed the cost side of the profitability tree but also improved upon the revenue side by shipping better products. Agile practitioners are no longer willing to even talk about the traditional […]
Leading the KANBAN way!!!

Leading the KANBAN way!!!

What is Kanban? KANBAN is a Toyota principle and literally means ‘Signboard’ in Japanese. Kanban advocates continuous improvement and emphasizes on making everyone get an explicit and clear idea of the entire process. It advocates minimum work in progress inventory and just in time production. This allows team to bring continuous improvement in their operations […]
DSDM Project Lifecycle

DSDM Project Lifecycle

A DSDM project consists of three key phases – Pre project phase Project lifecycle phase and Post project phase Pre project phase: In the pre project discussions happen at super management level wherein the business problems are identified, applications (to be built) are decided, these applications are prioritized, budget is allocated for the same and […]
Core principles and properties in KANBAN explained!

Core principles and properties in KANBAN explained!

Kanban derive its name from the Toyota principles of Lean and JIT production process. Some of Toyota’s key principles made it one of the market leaders in low cost production and helped them become industry leader in setting up many practices that others in the industry tried to follow. Kanban as in software development methodology […]
Data driven testing – DDT

Data driven testing – DDT

What is Data Driven testing? Applications have become very data dependent. A user while accessing a site need to enter a lot of data items which means a lot of input items. And each of the input item can have thousands of different types of words or keys. It is thus necessary to reproduce the […]
Best practices while configuring performance test infrastructure

Best practices while configuring performance test infrastructure

Environment setup and maintenance happens to be one of the key activities in a tester’s kitty. A tester not only has to monitor the setup of performance test environment but also has to drive the process of building performance test infrastructure consisting of servers, machines, software and tools that will be used to test the […]
5 principles to follow while doing Mobile Performance testing

5 principles to follow while doing Mobile Performance testing

Mobile revolution has very quickly brought the entire world under its purview and mobility has caught the world. Also every business has some or the other way of getting benefit out of this revolution. Every business (and now-a-days every revenue generating arm of a business) has recognized some or the other way of generating more […]
Capacity Testing using QTest

Capacity Testing using QTest

What is capacity Testing – a definition It determines how many users (or) transactions (or) hits a system can take up per unit time while meeting the performance SLAs of the system. It is basically done from a planning objective. Business teams constantly look forward for growth and scalability and they want their systems such […]
Cloud performance testing – A cake walk with AgileLoad

Cloud performance testing – A cake walk with AgileLoad

Testing an app for its usability, scalability and resource usage is performance testing. It helps the teams get an idea on the user experience during the high load period. Setting up the performance test environment is a key activity in the performance testing process and consumes sufficient amount of time of performance testing resources. The […]
Roles of team members involved in an AGILE Scrum project

Roles of team members involved in an AGILE Scrum project

Traditional project management methods demand many different roles like that of product manager, team leader, etc. All such roles are not required and are reduced from the scrum teams. SCRUM teams have three key members. The roles for each of them and their inter-associations are very clearly defined. In this article, we will first talk […]
Key Discussions (a-k-a meetings) that happen in AGILE – Scrum

Key Discussions (a-k-a meetings) that happen in AGILE – Scrum

Agile – Scrum is all about communication, cooperation and interaction. It is also about keeping oneself open to changes, thus product improvement, self-improvement and incremental problem solving. Through some of the key meetings that happen in Scrum, we will get to know how each of the above points are taken care of – Daily stand-up […]
9 Principles (building blocks) of DSDM – AGILE

9 Principles (building blocks) of DSDM – AGILE

DSDM or Dynamic System Development Method was first released in 1994 by DSDM consortium which was founded by the then software development enthusiasts who were targeting to give a proper structure to Rapid Application Development (RAD) method. It took time to take its current shape and by 2007 it gained good popularity & became a […]
Things to Unlearn for testing teams while moving to AGILE

Things to Unlearn for testing teams while moving to AGILE

When it comes to any transition / migration / organizational change, there is significant amount of unlearning that needs to happen. Most teams that are trying to move from their traditional approaches of software development to the newer AGILE ones are also bound to accept the fact that they won’t be able to adapt perfectly […]
7 Key Ideas in AGILE Development

7 Key Ideas in AGILE Development

For the past 4-5 years at least, AGILE has been making the news almost daily in the industry and with the kind of methods that the teams are following to develop software and the nature of output while following AGILE. The practitioners are very happy with what they are following and the methodology is gaining […]
AGILE Performance Testing: Best Practices

AGILE Performance Testing: Best Practices

SCRUM Board: It is always good to add all the performance testing – engineering priorities on the scrum board and prioritization from this point helps. Once these tasks are prioritized the efforts required for each of them can be identified through planning poker exercise. Now as the priorities are set, the performance engineering tasks are […]
AGILE & Performance testing

AGILE & Performance testing

In case of waterfall or other traditional approaches, we observed that each phase of the development process was allocated a time line and that phase was carried out based on the schedule laid much earlier in the project. Testing (and thus performance testing) came almost in the end of the cycle when app was first […]
AGILE – What, Why, How…???

AGILE – What, Why, How…???

How will I define it? A highly collaborative and incremental method of project execution that produces ‘high quality’ output with ‘just enough’ input can be termed as AGILE. AGILE means flexible and that’s what the methodology is. Can be molded / redesigned the way the project & end product demands it. What will make me […]
Load testing – Calculating the pacing time

Load testing – Calculating the pacing time

Performance testing practitioners always aspire to achieve a production like scenario and once that is achieve a load that is steady enough during the execution of the test. Though steady load is not what is observed in production, however from testing and issue resolution perspective it is important to achieve this target. So how should […]
Performance risk mitigation strategies

Performance risk mitigation strategies

Performance risk mitigation strategies In the earlier article, I spoke about some risks that development team, project managers and performance testers should take into consideration. In this article, I am making an attempt to highlight some strategies that one can adopt to mitigate some of those. Speed: Quick response to the request is directly proportional […]
Basic mathematics for performance testers

Basic mathematics for performance testers

Percentiles: In a set of observations, the value, below which a given percentage of observations fall, is called the percentile. Eg., 90th percentile is the value below which 90 % observations amongst the dataset can be found. It is an essential counter in scenarios where outliers (excessively high response time values in case of performance […]
Performance test results: What to report?

Performance test results: What to report?

In the days of AGILE, where quick application development, test, fix and releases are happening sharing a static report for a performance test is not the norm. A more and modern approach to what to be reported has taken shape. The project managers and business sponsors need more than a report to be presented. They […]
How to calculate the number of Virtual Users required while testing an app?

How to calculate the number of Virtual Users required while testing an app?

Performance testers, depend on the business teams to give the idea about the concurrent user load required for the application to be tested. If only, life would be that easy. In most scenarios, the information regarding the number of concurrent users (and the steady state time for those) is not available with the business teams. […]
90 percentile response time

90 percentile response time

The response time value for a transaction below which 90% of the data points (response time values) lie, is called the 90 percentile response time. In order to obtain the 90 percentile response time value for a transaction, sort all the response time values for that transaction in increasing order. Take the first 90 % […]
‘Monitoring’ a key partner of ‘Testing’

‘Monitoring’ a key partner of ‘Testing’

I have worked with many mobile app developers and I have often come across scenarios wherein the clear difference between testing an app and monitoring an app is not clear to the developers. I am hence making an attempt to clarify the concepts and highlight the differences here –  Here are some key differences: 1.) […]
A transition from Loadrunner to AgileLoad

A transition from Loadrunner to AgileLoad

Still remember the day when managers from my consulting firm decided to move the operations from expensive licensed tool to less costly solutions providing same features. We a bunch of three performance testers were then handed over the responsibility of moving the performance testing activities from LoadRunner to AgileLoad. We started the task with requirement […]
Risks of Testing Performance in Scaled down environments

Risks of Testing Performance in Scaled down environments

Performance Testing, planned considering the capacity of the production environment, ideally should be performed well before the Go-Live date. It needs to be carried out in production like environment to identify maximum performance issues in testing phase. But maintaining a production environment replica is expensive and most companies try avoiding these expenses by switching to […]
Most notable web application performance failures – a top 5 list

Most notable web application performance failures – a top 5 list

Unintentional infinite loops An infinite loop or unproductive loop happens in computer programs when loop never ends. This happens either due to the loop having no terminating condition, having one that can never be met, or one that causes the loop to start over again. Infinite loop causes programs to consume all of the processor […]
Best load testing tools – the right features mix

Best load testing tools – the right features mix

What are the best load testing tools for simulating traffic load to a web site?  There are many criteria allowing to differentiate load testing tools and it really depends on your needs. End-to-End performance measurement. This is one of the features that differentiate high-end load testing solutions. Measuring only the Web-application response time gives valuable […]
Number of Virtual Users – An unavoidable parameter while designing performance tests

Number of Virtual Users – An unavoidable parameter while designing performance tests

On day-to-day basis, we get a lot of performance testing project requests and our team analyzes and works on each request thoroughly. While working on such requests, we have observed that client project managers tend to apply a very common strategy to reduce costs of their performance test task. This strategy revolves around reducing the number […]
Comparison of Key Methodologies in AGILE

Comparison of Key Methodologies in AGILE

A lot of different methodologies are followed in AGILE. All of them are similar to each other but there are also some differences amongst those. In this article I am trying to highlight you those differences. Let’s look at them one by one. XP, Scrum, ASD, Crystal, DSDM and FDD are the methods compared here […]