In the last SIGiST meeting on performance and load, there were ~50 professionals from 20 and more companies that came to hear about the unique methods exercised by experts. 3 speakers presented the topic.
On hte first presentation, we heard Ariel S from Comverse, that was given the task to establish the performance and Load department and expertise across the company. Ariel spoke about what is it performance and load profession, what challenges we are facing in this technical field of expertise.
Also, we had a discussion on the importance of this profession or area of expertise in the testing field, and which skills are needed from a professional exercising it.
Ariel finished saying that such a 'superman' does not exist, but the thing is that performance and load engineers must be heterogeneous in their knowledge and skills in order to perform a good job.
On the second presentation we heard Elad S. from NESS, who presented a performance and load project of monitoring and control system for the army. He spoke about the benefits that the performance and load test can create, what is the downside of NOT doing it, and not doing it in the right time - e.g. at the last time of the project.
Elad, stressed out the KPIs that are suggested to monitor and analyzed in order to isolate and identify the bottlenecks and problems of the system. Saving 60% of the HW of the project, making more than 97% of the transactions stand in the time standards and requirements, and making the system support in hundred of clients instead of less than 200 - all due to good performance and load test project that identified them.
Elad presented the difference a performance and load project can do to a product/project from the client perspective - the difference between working with the system to not working with it at all - money down the drain... and another statistics...
The last speaker, Nachum D, spoke of the business aspects of performance and load. How it is the business driver as well as other functional testing efforts. How we can identify areas of weak performance and load ahead of time, looking for them in the architecture and design documents already - very early in the SDLC.
"The search for the problems from the data collected, is the real challenge of the performance and load engineer", said Dimmer. He presented a few methods for collecting data using tools, and collecting thin data, and important data that will be used for analysis by the performance and load engineer. The aspects presented by Dimmer were for a Web application project, done with a client in the UK.
in short, the meeting was very professional, people asked good questions offline, and the community got a chance to say: we believe performance and load is important, and should be discussed more.
* SIGiST Israel is initiating a working group, to start reviewing performance and load methods and approaches, and will try to produce a white paper to be published on the SIGiST website (www.sigist.org.il)
* SIGiST is presenting a performance and load seminar a the SIGiST Israel 2009 Conference, 26-29 July 2009, with Mieke Gevers - Performance and Load in Action. More details in www.sigist.org.il/minisites/sigist.index.html
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
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