Monday, March 14, 2011

Why is my application slow?

Wondering what kind of blog post is this?
So let me take you on a brief tour.

Some time back I got a chance to work on Performance Testing of our application (@ openbravo).

On this opportunity one quick questions popped up in my mind: "what do we seek in any performance testing tool?"
 - Easy to adjust with our requirement.
 - Easy to operate.
 - Easy reports at the end.

In our case Jmeter answered them all.
 - With Jmeter recorder we were able to record the flow of the application. And with some adjustments like variables, assertions, halts, etc. we reproduced the scenario where a normal user will be using the application.
 - After creating the script we can easily run it either from Jmeter UI console or CLI.
 - Now for reports Jmeter itself has good number of ways in which we can view reports (graphs, tree view etc), but for sharing those reports is a bit of overhead, so another simple way is to run the test through Hudson (CI tool) and view reports using Hudson's Jmeter plugin.

So basically before any end user/customer shouts "Why is my application slow?", this tool integrated with hudson does a regular check of the delay, failed requests, etc  to track the performance and give you an upper hand over other similar applications.

When I was on my way with this work someone asked me "RM and performance testing?", "shouldn't QA do that for you?"
I have a single answer to such question and truly writing there is nothing like mine or your work. It's only a perception, if we have time and scope of doing something then I think we should extend our hands and do it.

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