Agile performance testing
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This document discusses the importance of agile performance testing. It notes that primary post-release problems are often related to responsiveness degradation and inability to handle required throughput. Agile performance testing involves executing performance tests throughout the project, establishing baselines when architecture stabilizes, and investigating performance problems by writing failing tests and iteratively fixing issues locally and in deployed environments. It emphasizes that performance testing is iterative in nature and requires understanding how systems work in order to test relevant scenarios and correlate measurement results.
Agile performance testing
- 1. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Agile Performance Testing Cesario Ramos Independent Consultant AgiliX Agile Development Consulting
- 2. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Overview • Why Agile performance testing? • Nature of performance testing • Agile performance testing
- 3. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Why Agile Performance Testing?
- 4. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting We experience Primary problems after project release are NOT system crashes or incorrect system responses Primary problems are 1. Responsiveness degradation 2. Inability to handle required throughput Source: Weyuker E.
- 5. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Webshop for phones • Worked good during testing • In production system failed after 15 minutes – Authentication server load was not taken into account
- 6. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting We know
- 7. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Delay Hand-offs Task Switching Defects Inventory Relearning We see
- 8. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting We use
- 9. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting We expect? • To decrease overall lead-time – Throughput accounting v.s. Cost accounting • To have less problems in production • Decrease risk, increase reliability • To achieve overall better quality • Usability, Stability, Performance
- 10. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Still we see mostly Pre-production validation only!
- 11. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting WHY?
- 12. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting WHY? • Performance test team is expensive, overworked – We can only test the complete system – Performance testing against a moving target – What happens to my baselines during sprints? – “First make it work, then make it fast” • Deployment team is expensive, overworked – Deploying to test environment is very difficult and time consuming – The fewer deployments the better
- 13. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting WHY? • “premature optimization is waste!” • Separate teams – Developers, Testers, Deployers, Analysts • Costs are high for frequent deployment • Production like environments are expensive • We need specialists for performance • …
- 14. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting What could we do?
- 15. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting
- 16. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting
- 17. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Performance tests executed throughout the project
- 18. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Performance activities, refined and executed in collaboration.
- 19. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting What’s in it for you? • Project manager – Improved quality. – Decreased risk. • Developer – Will have effective discussions with requirement engineers and performance testers. • Tester – Not waste any time on trivial problems. – Help the team earlier and more efficiently.
- 20. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Nature of performance testing
- 21. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Grey box testing • You must understand how it works in order to write relevant test scripts. • You must understand the architecture.
- 22. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Beware of Integration points Chain reactions Blocked threads Unbalanced capacities No more simple record playback Source: Nygard M.
- 23. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Build stub components • Simulate SLA's • Test against the stubs • Create failure modes – Slow network responses – Huge data responses
- 24. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Correlation problem Per server – Thread pools – Connection pools – Request Response times – CPU usage – Memory usage – JVM behavior – Code hotspots
- 25. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Tuning Who dominates the CPU? – Operating system? (OS system load on CPU) – JVM? (object lifecycle, garbage collection) – Application? (algorithms) – None (blocked threads most of the time) There’s always one most prominent performance problem All performance problems express themselves in the hardware Source: Kirk Pepperdine
- 26. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Agile performance testing
- 27. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting • Feature driven planning is needed – Build a release plan where you performance test every few sprints, when couple of related features are done! • Need for establishing Baselines – Deployed and production – Useful when architecture stabilizes
- 28. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting • Invest in automatic – Deployment – Smoke tests – Integration testing
- 29. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Exploratory performance testing • Local performance tests – Memory leaks – Memory usage patterns – Threading issues • Code Reviews • Checks on use of boundedness, use of timeouts • Use of caching, cache configuration • Best practices on algorithms, synchronization, designs, value objects, functional programming, modularization, …
- 30. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting • Deployed performance tests – Workload issues • #clients, request frequency, arrival rate, duration – Configuration • Thread pool sizes, Connection pool sizes, Cache sizes, JVM configuration, queue sizes, … – Application • Replication, remote methods calls, database interactions, asynchronous messages, security service, …
- 31. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting When a performance problems is found 1. write a failing test for it 2. make it work local 3. make it work on the deployed environments
- 32. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Summarizing Performance testing is agile and iterative by nature! Grey box testing Avoid re-runs Automatic deployment Need to correlate various measurement results Establish baselines
- 33. © AgiliX Agile Development Consulting Agile Performance Testing Cesario Ramos Independent Consultant AgiliX Agile DevelopmentConsulting www.agilix.nl www.codecentric.nl cesario@agilix.nl