How To Add Agile Performance Testing To Your Quality EffortsThe Quadrant Can Look Like Waterfall A few weeks ago I attended (and spoke at) the STARWest tester conference. I love that conference. Janet Gregory gave a good talk that included her Testing Quadrant. I asked a few questions and the answers left me feeling challenged. You see the Quadrant splits testing efforts up into four quadrants: those that impact the end user, those that support the team, and technology facing and business facing issues.
When I hear testers discuss the Quadrant I mentally picture the cells stretched into a workflow.


Warning bells go off in my head. The Quandrant is starting to look less agile and more like the old waterfall methodology. In an agile methodology developers and testers work together throughout the application development. In the old waterfall methodology testers only get their hands on to the software to test once the developers are "finished." Waterfall is a horrible technique that often lets functional issues and performance bottlenecks into production environments.
I am concerned that a lot of what PushToTest TestMaker does gets dumped into Quadrant Four. I am completely in favor of great functional testing. Testers are usually the first people outside the development team to take a fresh look at a new software application. By virtue of the test results, testers can recommend changes to the product. These are the crtiques Janet Gregory uses to describe two of the four quadrants (Q3 and Q4.) Waiting until Q4 to operate performance tests, scalability tests, integration tests, and stress tests is too late! Testers won't be armed with the test data they need to make a compelling case to change the software to developers and business managers.


Here is what I have in mind:

• Business managers define the requirements to pass the test criteria. For example, "Site must perform log-in tasks at up to 500 concurrent users." This happens early in the process so testers know what they will need to accomplish.
  
• Developers and testers work collaboratively at the beginning of the project to define and operate functional tests. PushToTest TestMaker repurposes the same functional tests to be load and performance tests.
• IT Managers repurpose the same functional tests in Q2 to be production service monitors. They identify metrics of service delivery to prove-out Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance. They use PushToTest TestMaker to repurpose the same functional tests to be production monitors.
  

All of the above is possible when you choose the right tool and methodology.

Click here to see how it all hangs together.

-Frank
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