STARWEST 2023 - Performance Testing & Monitoring
Monday, October 2
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
Automation Framework Essentials
Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...
Tuesday, October 3
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Jeff Pierce as he...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
With the advent of frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, the landscape of application performance has changed significantly in terms of testing and measurement. Gone are the days of measuring response time as a single value based on back-end performance. In modern web and mobile applications, additional layers need to be peeled apart at the front end to truly understand its performance characteristics. Traditional approaches to performance testing are no longer sufficient to provide a delightfully responsive user experience. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he details new developments in the...
Wednesday, October 4
Test Architecture for API First Platforms
API First Platforms adopt rapid application development lifecycle and high velocity deployments. Quality assurance teams are stressed to reduce the automation backlog and have a limited window to catch up with speed of deployments. This session will discuss how Venkatesh's team at Oracle adopted a creative approach to accelerate test automation by adopting an innovative “Automate First” model. The core pillar of this test architecture is creation of acceptance driven component tests leveraging virtualized services by developers. This laid a solid foundation which assured validation of...
Creating a Comprehensive API Testing Ecosystem
Maintaining API test cases across multiple environments, for different load levels, and types of tests (eg. smoke, functional, regression) traditionally required separate tests be written and maintained. Test maintenance is expensive. If you have three lower environments that tests are run for, then you usually have at least three different tests you are trying to keep in sync. If you have a new API added for a microservice, then you have to modify and validate across all three tests at a minimum. If you are running different load levels for build tests verses load tests, for example, that...
Thursday, October 5
How My Testing Skills Served My Personal Life
Kristoffer Nordström faced one of the most challenging and emotional times of his life when his daughter was diagnosed with a rare and life-threatening disease. As a caregiver, father, and primary project manager, he had to learn everything he could about her illness, treatment options, and potential outcomes. The skills he acquired as a tester helped him manage this overwhelming amount of information, make sense of it, and develop a plan of action while still being a loving and ever-present parent. He asked questions, researched, and analyzed data to make informed decisions about his...
Chihuahua Load Tests!
Because, bigger isn't always better. Especially nowadays. Do your teams need help accommodating those humongous load tests in your agile & continuous projects? Do you need frozen environments? Or, stop (freeze) all new changes until you can execute your colossal test? Everything to find the limits of your cloud, elastic, and distributed application? All of that struggle to repeat it because the metrics you've got became invalid with the next release? You should reframe the perspective and stop focusing on generating a few massive load tests. Why not have Chihuahua-sized load tests? You...
Data Quality Engineering: Enabling Success of Data Driven Solutions
The success enabler tools supporting business organizations within an enterprise are primarily driven by the underlying AI/ML powered solutions, data & analytics platforms, and enterprise applications suite. In modern data driven economy, the dependability (quality and timeliness) of data powering these business enablers, directly influences the success or failure of the business offering and adoption. The major factors for constrained data dependability can be attributed to limiting capabilities for validation of data availability, usability, reliability, relevance, and presentability...
Distributed Load Testing in Kubernetes
In an increasingly interconnected digital world, consumers of online services have become more savvy with ever-increasing expectations. The performance and scalability of these online services are critical to their success, and load testing is an important tool to evaluate these capabilities. Traditional centralized load testing needs to catch up in replicating real-world scenarios. Organizations should replicate actual user behavior by distributing simulated user traffic across multiple geographically diverse locations, enabling a more realistic evaluation of system performance and...
Graceful Degradation—Failing with Style
We do a lot to reduce the chance that our application is down, forgetting that it will eventually happen. We should be focusing on not reducing the risk of failure, but reducing its impact – this is widely known as Graceful Degradation. Adopting a Graceful Degradation strategy suggests that it is possible to provide the service for your customers even if certain parts of your application do not behave as expected. Failure should not be an exception in software, it should be the rule. That is why Graceful Degradation is such a key concept in software delivery. Resiliency is about having the...