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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 2 Ratings

Good Primer, Lacks Depth - 2009-02-05
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Performance Testing Practice - 2009-07-09
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Networking
Operating Systems
Software Engineering

Sub-Categories:
Networking > Administration
Operating Systems > Windows .NET Server
Windows .NET Server > Troubleshooting/Performance Tuning
Software Engineering > Testing and Debugging