The Art of Application Performance Testing

Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance
By: 
Ian Molyneaux
Published: 
2009
Pages: 
158
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Book Description

This practical book provides a step-by-step approach to testing mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before they're deployed—a vital topic to which other books devote one chapter, if that.

Businesses today live and die by network applications and web services. Because of the increasing complexity of these programs, and the pressure to deploy them quickly, many professionals don't take the time to ensure that they'll perform well and scale effectively. The Art of Application Performance Testing explains the complete life cycle of the testing process, and demonstrates best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications. With this book, you'll learn to:

    Implement an effective application performance testing strategy
  • Interpret performance test results
  • Cope with different application technologies and architectures
  • Use automated performance testing tools
  • Test traditional local applications, web-based applications, and web services (SOAs)
  • Recognize and resolves issues that are often overlooked in performance testts

Written by a consultant with 30 years of experience in the IT industry and over 12 years experience with performance testing, this easy-to-read book is illustrated with real-world examples and packed with practical advice. The Art of Application Performance Testing thoroughly explains the pitfalls of an inadequate testing strategy and offers you a robust, structured approach for ensuring that your applications perform well and scale effectively when the need arises.

Member Reviews: 

Review By: Arvind Pal Singh
06/23/2010I commend the author's great writing style and presentation and his ability to condense performance testing—such a vast and serious topic--in this small-looking book. Anyone working in performance testing will be able to grasp what he says. Molyneaux excellently incorporated his experiences, in particular, in his emphasis on performance testing towards software applications in the real world. In line with author, I, too, hope that this book leads to bringing standards and practices relevant to performance testing, which could be consistently followed across different industries.

I focused mainly on chapter four while reading this book. Other chapters are generalized, and similar material is available in the user manuals of certain performance testing tools. Molyneaux brought his own flavor by providing details from his own perspective. I understand most of the performance testing tools have their own set of parameters, but, overall, the interpretation of the results is more important in order to identify performance bottlenecks. For beginning performance testers, the first three chapters are recommended.

The book also proves useful to experienced performance testers as well and developers involved in fixing performance issues. Molyneaux did a great job in demarcating the practice from any industry tool. I've already recommended this book to my co-workers to strengthen their knowledge. One of my co-workers immediately found the discussion on key performance targets in chapter two especially helpful.

Overall, I have high regard for this book, which has touched a much ignored part of software applications. In the future, I would like Molyneaux to elaborate on chapter five to include application technology and it's impact on performance testing.

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