Performance Testing: Far from Steady State

The dot com era ushered in a number of industry standard load testing tools. While there is no doubt that these tools have helped improve the quality of IT systems, performance testing in the IT industry is far from steady state. There are still severe gaps between performance test results and production systems performance in IT projects. This paper proposes a number of areas where performance testing needs to improve radically, several of which can be incorporated in to load testing tools. Examples are also provided of simple analytics during single user performance testing to demonstrate the effectiveness of this extra but necessary step in the testing process.