What is meant by Internet realism during load testing/capacity assessment? Part of it is understanding the importance of not only carefully characterizing the behavior of visitors to a Web site, but also the behavior of the Internet itself. Contributing to this realism are important measures such as packet loss, link speeds, millions of IP addresses, browser emulation, SSL, and other factors that can cause significant performance issues. The Internet has all these issues, and testing with these values is an important part of gaining a clear picture of system performance right from the start. Philip Joung shows you the different factors and how each one can have a significant impact on your site's performance.

If you oversee a mission-critical Web site, you want to be able to predict how many users you can handle within acceptable response times. Here are three fundamental load testing concepts you can't do without.

The preparation of a realistic, practical project schedule is an essential management function for obtaining stakeholder commitment, setting expectations, and communicating within the team and organization what is achievable. Doing this preparation well is another challenge-one that must be conquered. Rex Black helps participants see the bigger project scheduling picture by focusing on issues such as constituent tasks, the underlying dependencies between them, and the risks attached to the completion of those tasks.

Test automation is a specialized form of software development where executable code is produced for the validation and testing process. Many best practices have been identified to allow developers to code more quickly, efficiently, and correctly, but few test automators have adopted these practices. Learn about several of these "best practices"-including code reviews and coding standards-that can be applied to automated test development. Discover how you, as an automated test developer, can capitalize on the benefits provided by these practices.