Agile Thinking: A New Approach to Performance Testing

As an avid advocate of Agile development processes, Graham Parsons, CEO of Reflective Solutions, is aware of a strange anomaly that surrounds testing within the Agile environment. While the purpose of Agile is to ensure that software is developed in a progressive way – with the focus on checking that an application works at every stage or iteration – in the majority of cases only functional or unit / acceptance testing is carried out throughout the Agile process. Graham doesn’t believe that he can be the only one who has thought about the conspicuous question...what about performance testing?

The norm within our industry is to check that an application will perform or scale at times of peak user traffic at the very last minute, when a project is nearing completion and an application is approaching launch date. Why is this considered acceptable? At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this approach has a clear and fundamental disadvantage: it runs the risk that a significant performance defect may only be discovered after months of development work and / or days from application launch. If this risk becomes a reality, it can be hugely detrimental from a commercial perspective. Graham talks to EuroSTAR’s STAR Tester to answer these concerns.

Reflective Solutions Sign Partnership Agreement with Maximo EAM Specialist Vetasi

Reflective Solutions has announced a new technology partnership agreement with, Vetasi, the UK’s leading Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) consultancy.

Reflective specialises in the development of enterprise-class application performance testing and monitoring tools. The company’s flagship product, StressTester™, is used by major organisations to test that their Intranet and Extranet applications and their e-commerce Web sites are fully optimised and scalable to support their business requirements.

StressTester™ is widely used to validate the performance criteria for users of Maximo EAM and other ERP and EAM applications. Unlike other enterprise-class tools, StressTester™ does not require weeks of set-up time which means that full, realistic performance tests can be conducted during the development phase, with results obtained typically in hours or days rather than the weeks required with other tools.