Macys.com holiday sales soar 26%
A site that performs well helps your bottom line. Note in the article during the critical December 2008 month sales increased 39.1% over December 2007. Obviously several factors play into this kind of success. The site had to remain available so users could access it. The site had to perform in order for users to stay connected and not go somewhere else.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Golden Rule #1 - It is what you don't test that breaks in production
I'm putting together information for some folks around performance. So I'm coming up with a set of golden rules. My first one is:
It is what you don't test that breaks in production.
This isn't specific to WebSphere products either. This goes pretty much across the board.
I work with quite a few people on performance issues. There are two types of problems that could have easily been avoided had the testing been conducted properly.
(a) 80/20 rule
Some people live by an 80/20 rule. We'll test the 20% of the application that 80% of the users use. Um, what about the other 80% that goes untested? What if that brings down the site even if only a single user hits it? I'd rather keep the site up and test everything. Wouldn't you?
(b) Boundary value problems
Everything takes input. Not every application validates input. This leads to problems with applications running unbounded database queries because the filter wasn't filled out correctly. Or someone fills in all 250 rows on a page and crashes the site because the testers missed that point. Every use case has boundaries. Test the zero case, the in between case and then infinity. To infinity and beyond my friends! That is where we can take our sites if we do the testing right!
It is what you don't test that breaks in production.
This isn't specific to WebSphere products either. This goes pretty much across the board.
I work with quite a few people on performance issues. There are two types of problems that could have easily been avoided had the testing been conducted properly.
(a) 80/20 rule
Some people live by an 80/20 rule. We'll test the 20% of the application that 80% of the users use. Um, what about the other 80% that goes untested? What if that brings down the site even if only a single user hits it? I'd rather keep the site up and test everything. Wouldn't you?
(b) Boundary value problems
Everything takes input. Not every application validates input. This leads to problems with applications running unbounded database queries because the filter wasn't filled out correctly. Or someone fills in all 250 rows on a page and crashes the site because the testers missed that point. Every use case has boundaries. Test the zero case, the in between case and then infinity. To infinity and beyond my friends! That is where we can take our sites if we do the testing right!
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Winter Hibernation
I know. I've been lax on updating this site. Partly because of the online holiday shopping season (I'm always busy that time of the year). Partly because of winter (we got socked in with 5" of snow this morning).
But I will come out of my shell soon and start commenting on new things to cover for 2009. We have some interesting Process Server testing strategies to talk about too which I'm absolutely excited to share with you.
Today my focus is on getting my speaker proposals in for the IMPACT 2009 conference.
But I will come out of my shell soon and start commenting on new things to cover for 2009. We have some interesting Process Server testing strategies to talk about too which I'm absolutely excited to share with you.
Today my focus is on getting my speaker proposals in for the IMPACT 2009 conference.
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