Web performance in seven steps: Summary and Conclusions
Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: January 20th, 2010
Previous time I blogged about the last step of the seven steps, step 7: Share the responsibility for the whole chain, a non-technical but rather a communication and behavior thing which I found crucial for success. We now have reached the end of this series and I'll sum up the topics we've dealt with and draw some conclusions. (more...)
Web performance in seven steps; Step 4: Test continuously
Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: July 22nd, 2009
Last time I blogged about the importance of representative performance testing. Having production-like properties for hardware, OS, JVM, app server, database, external systems and simulated user load are essential to prevent bad performance surprises when going live. In addition, I described how cloud computing can be utilized to generate high loads on-demand without having to worry about the infrastructure.
Continuous performance testing
With a representative test as one of the last steps before going live we prevent that expensive bad-performance surprises will pop up in production. However, the same surprises will pop-up, only earlier and with less impact. To save costs and prevent large architectural refactoring, it is crucial to test for performance as soon as possible. This is just like any other software defects and Quality Assurance: the later in the development process defects are detected, the more costly these defects are.
At a popular web shop I had the following challenge: (more...)
Web performance in seven steps; step 3: test representatively
Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: June 29th, 2009
Last time I blogged about the importance of benchmarking the architecture and new technology in a Proof of Concept for Performance. This time I’ll deal with the importance of representative performance testing.
Slowness of applications in development environments is often neglected with the rationale that faster hardware in the production environment will solve this problem. However, whether this is really true can only be predicted with a test on a representative environment and in a representative way. In such an environment, there needs to be more representative than just the hardware.
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Web performance in seven steps; step 2: Execute a proof of concept
Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: June 15th, 2009
Last week I blogged about setting your performance goals: defining your requirements. This time I'll blog about the importance of a Proof of Concept for performance.
The IT world is very sensitive to trends. Having been around in the IT industry for 15 years, I’ve seen a few. A technology is hot for a while, and then quickly becomes out-of-fashion and yesterdays news. It will be replaced by something which is much better and what everyone follows almost blindly.
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Web performance in seven steps; how performance problems manifest themselves
Posted by Jeroen Borgers at around evening time: June 2nd, 2009
Last week I blogged about the increasing load at web shops and the increasing challenges for developers and operators. The question to be answered was stated as: how can we prevent performance and availability problems; how can we assure that a web site is always quick and available? In this blog I’ll describe some of the forms in which I found performance difficulties to present themselves. (more...)
Fitnesse – Selenium integration struggles
Posted by Cirilo Wortel around lunchtime: April 23rd, 2009
Recently I was challenged by a client to test a new web application in an Agile project. The team was new at working Agile and even more with working together with a functional tester, altogether this resulted in me getting very little development support from the team.
Because the lack of tooling and support I focussed my efforts on just recording test-scripts using Selenium IDE, hoping I would be able to reuse them once I got the development support I had been requesting. The plan was to integrate the pre-recorded scripts in a more extended test environment in a later stage of the project.
Technical debt is just like.. well debt
Posted by Erwin van der Koogh around lunchtime: November 15th, 2008
About 2 years ago I first heard the term "technical debt" from one of my coworkers. Well, I heard technical depth instead of debt first, which clearly did not help me see why it was such a great term for crappy code and quick and dirty solutions.
maven-dashboard-plugin 1.1 released
Posted by Lars Vonk in the late evening: July 10th, 2008
A new version of Xebia's open source maven-dashboard-plugin has been released. This version fixed some bugs. A quick guide on how to use the dashboard in your project please read this blogpost.
Keep an eye on this blog or checkout the roadmap in Jira for upcoming releases.
Agile way of documentation!!!
Posted by ShriKant Vashishtha in the late afternoon: May 5th, 2008
As you enter into Agile world, a statement welcomes you - "Just do enough documentation". For quite sometime, I was puzzled what we really mean by this. In my view "just-enough" is very ambiguous or abstract. You cannot quantify it. For some who are working for a development project, creating documentation may not make much sense as you can find people just across your table to answer your question and you can get away by doing "not just-enough documentation" (no java-docs, no project overview etc). However when you come in maintenance cycle of the project, it just sucks. Maintenance may implicitly means new people, a long project cycle and people who leave the project or even organization itself.
What do you do then? People who were in the project at the beginning may not be there anymore, either from customer side or from software developers side. Without having a knowledge repository, new people will try to reinvent the wheel, will go through the code (white box, which ideally should be a black box most of the times) or will look like people who enter in a dark tunnel without having clue on what they are supposed to do.
Maven2 Dashboard Plugin Released
Posted by Jeroen van Erp in the wee hours: March 27th, 2008
Quality is an everyday part of the life of a Xebia software developer. One of the ways to get insight into quality is by looking at metrics like FindBugs, PMD, Simian, Code Coverage, etc. With large software products consisting of different modules, quality assurance can become quite a trying task. This means that tools which alleviate this burden are a welcome addition to our toolbox.
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