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.

StressTester’s Graham Parsons talks to The Tester about performance testing in an Agile environment

The adoption of Agile practices during the development of a web application can deliver significant benefits, both in terms of an application’s quality and the enhanced productivity that generally results from the Agile development process.

One of the key purposes of Agile is to ensure that the current version of software functions as
expected, no matter what stage the development is at. To this end, every iteration of an Agile
project includes functional testing in the form of unit and acceptance testing. The early discovery and resolution of defects written into the code can help to guard against major unforeseen problems arising near project completion. After all, who wants to find a fault with the application weeks or even days before launch? This could severely compromise an application’s launch date (and delivery budget) and could cost a company dearly, in terms of overspend, lost revenue or business opportunities. There is even potential reputational damage to consider...

So, with a firm case in mind for functional testing during every iteration of an Agile project, together with an acknowledgement that this approach has become industry best practice, why do most developers apply a different logic when it comes to performance testing? In the latest issue of The Tester Graham Parsons discusses the risks and barriers surrounding performance testing in an Agile environment.

StressTester’s Graham Parsons talks to Internet Retailing about the importance of performance testing in the New Year.

Figures show that online sales are continuing to grow annually; according to the Office of National Statistics, average weekly online sales increased by 36.6% year-on-year to £660 million a week in November 2010 and during the same period, web business accounted for 10.5% of all sales in the UK retail sector. At the same time however, consumers are becoming less patient with web pages that take more than a few seconds to load. Extensive research into consumer behaviour shows that if customers perceive a website to be too slow, they are likely to switch to a competitor’s website to make their purchase, resulting in lost revenue and lost customers for the original retailer.

With all of that in mind, ecommerce represents a significant revenue stream for most retailers in 2011, provided that their websites are up to the task. Internet Retailing asked Graham parsons why performance is the key to a website’s success.