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.
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