Performance Testing - a STeP-IN Theme Conference

Abstract: For nearly a decade, the predominate paradigm for performance testing can be summarized as “add two weeks to the end of the development cycle to conduct a series of pre-planned performance tests to ensure the application is ready to go live.” Unfortunately this leads to finding serious last hour performance and stability problems, the kind of problems that should be found and fixed much earlier in the development cycle.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is changing this paradigm. VSTS enables software development teams to begin the process of ensuring that application performance is addressed throughout the development lifecycle starting at the very beginning of the project and continuing through production level monitoring of the system’s performance. The keys to enabling this advancement in the prevalent performance testing paradigm include:

A software development model that focuses on identifying and collaboratively testing and validating application Qualities of Service from project kick-off.
A single performance testing tool that enables not just collection of end-to-end response time, but enables component based performance analysis.
Performance testing tools that are seamlessly integrated into the developer’s, tester’s and manager’s daily work environment.
The ability for testers and developers to share their tests and expertise collaboratively to highlight and address performance concerns as soon as they are detectable.
Context sensitive guidance designed to assist both developers and testers to address many of the challenges inherent to performance testing.
A performance testing tool that enables the team to go well beyond simple load generation by leveraging the power and extensibility of the Visual Studio.

While the effects and benefits of quality are quite clear, what the industry has been missing is a solution that enables organizations to apply quality at every stage of development – from the first job to the last – as an integrated solution. Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers does exactly that - in conjunction with Visual Studio Team Suite and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, enables every discipline in an organization to have a positive impact on the quality of the software being produced.

Profile: Tejasvi Kumar works as a Technology Specialist with Microsoft India’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team. He brings with him over 10 years of industry experience having worked in the fields of Software Development, Product Management, Pre-sales Consulting & Application Lifecycle Management. He has vast experience in software tools that address the different phases of the software development lifecycle. In his current role at Microsoft, he evangelizes on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) in order to help customers optimally use these tools. His academic qualifications include an engineering degree and an MS.