Performance, Load or Stress … what’s the difference?
Posted by Brian in Curated by me, Software testing on 20 July 2011
When it comes to non-functional testing, even many experienced testers aren’t sure of the difference between performance testing, load testing, and stress testing.
Do you know what type of testing is used to test the time difference between the generation of an HTTP request and the return of a response? How about the testing required to determine the maximum number of concurrent users a system can support before it fails?
In this handy article, Vijay from Software Testing Help looks at the fundamental differences between performance, load, and stress testing, and describes the goals of each technique – together with some useful examples.
New contract with Yorkshire Building Society
I’m pleased to announce I started a new contract with Yorkshire Building Society today.
From the Yorkshire Building Society website:
“Yorkshire Building Society is one of the largest building societies in the UK. We have 2.8 million members and assets of over £30 billion.”
I’m to be the overall test manager for a business critical ATM testing workstream within a larger business merger/data migration programme, with responsibility for driving testing through successive phases of system test, UAT, and NFT over the next few months.
This contract marks my return to the financial services sector after a break of ten years, and while I realise it will be a challenge, I’m looking forward to adding to my skills and domain knowledge.
Why test managers should focus on critical testing processes
Posted by Brian in Curated by me, Software testing on 3 February 2011
As a test manager, if you focus on ensuring critical testing processes are performed well, your project will almost certainly succeed. Neglect your critical testing processes, and your efforts will fail – regardless of the level of your own talent or that of your team.
In this article, Rex Black of RBCS outlines his Critical Testing Processes (CTP) framework, and describes how critical test processes directly affect a test team’s ability to identify bugs, reduce risks, and generate information about the quality of software.
The article offers some useful direction on how to formulate an approach for using CTP to improve your own testing processes.
Limitations of the V-model
Posted by Brian in Curated by me, Software development, Software testing on 2 February 2011
The V-model is widely acknowledged as the industry’s standard testing model; but is this down to it being the best approach, or has the V-model simply evolved to become a de-facto standard?
In this interesting article, James Christie looks at the “dangerous and seductive V-model”, and helps to explain its flaws (rooted in a basis on the traditional Waterfall), as well as offering some workarounds such as the W-model, the Butterfly model, or the adoption of a more iterative, Agile approach.
Read the article in full on James’s site – ClaroTesting.com.
Why your test system needs Root Cause Analysis
Posted by Brian in Software development, Software testing on 31 October 2010
One of the quickest and easiest metrics to introduce into an existing test system is Root Cause Analysis. It’s also one of the most powerful, with the potential to radically improve the whole development lifecycle if properly implemented.
If you use a good incident management tool, adding RCA to your incident management process is as easy as adding a mandatory field to the incident form. Very little overhead is introduced – when an incident needs to be closed, the only extra work required is to specify the root cause from a pre-defined list, and perhaps add a note for extra information if required.
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