Beautiful Testing

Chapter 4. Collaboration Is the Cornerstone of Beautiful Performance Testing

Scott Barber

Performance testing is all too frequently the most frustrating, complicated, understaffed, time-crunched, misunderstood, combative, and thankless aspect of a software development project, but it doesn’t have to be. I have experienced beautiful performance testing firsthand on several occasions. In fact, it seems like most career performance testers have at least one story about beautiful performance testing.

So, what are the attributes of beautiful performance testing? I think that beautiful performance testing is:

• Desired

• Deliberate

• Useful

• Technical

• Social

• Respectful

• Humble

• Efficient

• (Appropriately) challenging

• Value-driven

• Value-focused

But above all, I think that for performance testing to be beautiful, it must be collaborative.

In the stories that follow, I share with you the critical incidents that shaped my view of performance testing beauty. Coincidentally, this chapter is also the story of how one software development company’s approach to performance testing became increasingly beautiful over the course of several development projects. While you read them, pay particular attention to two things. First, notice that none of these stories starts out, shall we say, beautifully. Second, notice that in each story collaboration was the key to progress, success, and/or conflict resolution.

Setting the Stage

All of the events that follow occurred over a 14-month period during the Dot-Com Era at a boutique custom software development company where I was the performance testing technical lead and practice manager. The events span several development projects, but the core project team was substantially the same throughout—and when I say project team, I am referring to not just those who wrote the code, but also to the executives, account managers, project management, business analysts, testers, system administrators, and technical support staff.

Although I have done my best to recount these events accurately and objectively, what follows is exclusively my perspective of the events that occurred. The events did occur in the sequence in which they appear in this chapter, and I have not taken any intentional liberties with them, other than to remove or replace offensive epithets with less offensive ones. In addition, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that much of the identifying information related to individuals, clients, and contracts has been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, the shy, and those I’ve lost touch with and couldn’t get permission to use their real names.