The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance [Paperback]

Ian Molyneaux (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596520662 | ISBN-13: 978-0596520663 | Publication Date: January 30, 2009 | Edition: 1

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:

• Set realistic performance testing goals
• 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 tests

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.

"Ian has maintained a vendor-agnostic methodology beautifully in this material. The metrics and graphs, along with background information provided in his case studies, eloquently convey to the reader, 'Methodology above all, tools at your discretion...' Ian's expertise shines through throughout the entire reading experience." -- Matt St. Onge, Enterprise Solution Architect, HCL Technologies America / Teradyne

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Originally hailing from Auckland, New Zealand, Ian Molyneaux ended up in IT purely by chance after applying for an interesting looking job advertised as "junior computer operator" in the mid '70s. The rest is history, 30 years later I've held many roles in IT, although I've shied away from anything management related as I'm a techie at heart. His current role is EMEA SME (Subject Matter Expert) for Application Performance Assurance at Compuware. Presently residing in Buckinghamshire, U.K. with wife Sarah, daughter Sasha, and two cats, and trying to get used to the idea of turning 49!

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (January 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596520662
• ISBN-13: 978-0596520663
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #250,521 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #97 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Testing

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Primer, Lacks Depth, February 4, 2009

By 

Techie Evan - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance (Paperback)

This well-written primer provides just enough information to help one get started with automated performance testing. It outlines several recommended practices to automating performance testing (e.g., user activity recording, deploying software monitors, etc) and describes how some of them were put to use in two case studies and how they helped in root cause analyses. It discusses desirable capabilities to look for in performance testing tools and only briefly mentions special considerations for technologically complex applications such as those that use AJAX, SAP, or Citrix, for example. A more in-depth discussion of those considerations and how to address them would have been really useful. Although information on select tool vendors and the type of tool offerings they provide is included, there is no additional description of any of the tools' capabilities or qualities (for this, the reader has to visit the provided vendor's website). Finally, most of the sample scenarios discussed in the book pertain to performance testing in Windows environments; while this won't matter to most readers because the principles discussed are equally applicable to other OS environments, this may matter to some readers who do not work with Windows environments at all.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great reference, January 10, 2011

By 

Dustin Davis "Programmers Unlimited" (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance (Paperback)

Though this book is geared towards Quality Assurance testers, developers can take away a lot from this material. The book explains methodologies at a high level and remains vendor-agnostic which is nice, but the context always seems to hover around Windows. If it were not for the specific case studies (which seem like they are from the author's personal experience) I would have to say this book would be more on the boring side.

The author did a great job of "teaching a man to fish" instead of "giving a man a fish". For example, in chapter 2, instead of simply giving a list of tools and telling readers to try them, the author goes into details about what to look for in a performance testing tool and how to choose one based on the scenario.

I would recommend this text to anyone who is new to testing as a great introduction, but I would suspect that experienced testers would also gain some insight from it as well.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Performance Testing Practice, July 9, 2009

By 

B. Franklin (RTP, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance (Paperback)

I am building a new performance testing practice at my company. This book is the most comprehensive writing I have found on the topic of application performance testing. The book flows well and is replete with valuable metrics and graphs that have been of great benefit to the task at hand. Additionally, the book will serve as a beneficial source of reference for future performance testing engagements.

Well done.