8:45 am - 9:45 am
504 Load Testing With OpenSTA - By Dan Downing
OpenSTA is increasingly popular as an open-source alternative to commercial load testing tools. However, performance testers making this choice are confronted by the dual challenges of learning both tool and process, without the formal training support of commercial products. In this class, Dan Downing demystifies the fundamentals of conducting effective load tests. He will introduce you to his 5-Steps of Load Testing: Discover, Develop, Run/Fix, Report. You'll experience OpenSTA on a real site: modeling load, developing scripts, configuring, launching and monitoring tests, analyzing, interpreting and reporting results. You'll learn workarounds for tool limitations—especially in results analysis—and how to access community resources to support your learning back at work.
Dan Downing
Dan Downing is a co-founder and VP of Testing Services at Mentora, an application testing and managed hosting company. Author of numerous presentations, whitepapers and articles on performance testing, Dan also wrote the 5-Steps of Load Testing, a methodology he taught at Mercury Education Centers. During the past 10 years, he has led more than 100 performance projects on a broad range of applications and companies, and is a regular conference speaker.
www.mentora.com
My thoughts on the class
OpenSTA is a lightweight, performance testing tool which is open source. It was great to have someone demo the tool and explain some of the ins and outs. It might be good for some of the baseline testing we are doing. However, there is a learning curve and it is more labor intensive to produce pretty graphs and so forth.
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10:30 am - 11:30 am
606 Software Process Improvement's Dirty Little Secret - By Robin Goldsmith
Despite investing copious time and money, organizations often fail to realize desired benefits from formal software improvement initiatives, such as Six Sigma and capability maturity model-fitting. Lessons learned analyses continually point to the same set of "usual suspects," but overlook a key implementation shortcoming that actually may account for much of the costly initiatives' underperformance. This is a major reason such process improvement initiatives often do not improve. Learn about this seldom-recognized flaw that afflicts many high-overhead initiatives, and how organizations often lose sight of key weakest-link exceptions to their seemingly comprehensive practices
for improving software processes.
Robin Goldsmith
Robin Goldsmith has been president of the Go Pro Management consultancy since 1982. He works directly with and trains professionals in business engineering, requirements analysis, software acquisition, project management, quality assurance and testing. Previously he was a developer, a systems programmer/DBA/QA and a project leader with the City of Cleveland, leading financial institutions and a "Big 4" consulting firm.
Author of numerous articles and the recent book "Discovering REAL Business Requirements for Software Project Success," Robin was formerly international vice president of the Association for Systems Management and executive editor of the Journal of Systems Management.
My thoughts on the class
Robin was awesome, I got a lot out of his presentations. I'd share the dirty little secret with you - if I thought you were ready... 