David Rubinstein: Performance Anxiety
November 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Thanks to the Web performance measuring tools at Gomez, I learned that SDTimes.com performs quite poorly. I mean, I always knew it was slow to load some images and fill some frames, but now we have hard metrics to show just how poorly it performs—down to the problematic JavaScript code itself.
Web performance was very much on the minds of the attendees at last month’s Software Test & Performance Conference. At least, that’s the impression I received from observing the large overflow turnout for performance testing guru Scott Barber’s keynote address.
While performance might not be the most critical aspect of the SDTimes.com Web site, back-end response time certainly is a big deal for the financial sector, where the price of a stock can change in less than a second. If the transaction rate is slow, millions of dollars can be lost in just a few moments.
Joseph Schlam, a principal software engineer in performance testing at Fidelity Investments, observed if someone puts in an order to buy a stock at, say, $50 a share, but because of slow software performance the stock reaches $52 a share before the order is placed, that customer won’t trade with Fidelity much longer. “There are tremendous amounts of money tied to [Web application] performance,” he said.
So, if it’s so important to businesses, Barber asked, why is it an afterthought in so many cases? Why do businesses leave so little time for this kind of testing?
It often comes down to myths, which Barber sought to dispel during his talk. “Good performance testing demands that the people doing it understand every aspect of the system—architecture, technologies, interfaces and configurations, and how users interact with the system,” he stated.
To do this, performance testers not only need access to test managers, or even development managers—they also need to communicate regularly with the business stakeholders, Barber posited. “Without access to the people making business decisions about what goes live when and what risks they’re willing to take, [performance testers] just don’t know what’s important, and can’t prioritize” areas to work on to gain more performance.
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