Testing is Rocket Science Not Brain Surgery

This is inclusive of all the parties involved in the delivery of the system under test and your performance testing effort. Not only will you have dependencies on the application(s) being delivered and/or functionally sound but also on ancillary development to augment your ability to monitor and measure the application. In order to perform the best analysis on the application it’s often necessary to engage the development team as the SDLC rarely makes room for a tester who can perform development duties, if for no other reason than the risk of introducing defects through your coding efforts. So we mitigate this by engaging the development team as early as possible to ensure that the development necessary to facilitate testing occurs.

So recognizing this possible make or break dependency to your test effort is the first step, the second is being able to gauge with some level of accuracy what the time and resource requirements will be to make it happen. From a consultant’s perspective this means you better be pretty comfortable with the technologies at work and understand what that effort will be before you make your request. It means that your ally is going to be the technical architect, and when none is present the lead developer, and when he/she is available a driven developer, and when all else fails you need to be able to position yourself as being capable of doing the job. You won’t have the luxury of figuring this out at your leisure so look for the following signs and make a judgment call.

• You’ll need to assess where the project is in the timeline.
• Know the players on the technical and business side you’ll need an SLA and inputs about proposed or historical usage.
• What is the comfort level of the team with the technologies being used?
• How does the development team gauge the effort needed, if it’s a huge deal to add some logging, write some SQL and provide some metrics, you might be in for a challenge.
• If an environment build out takes longer than a few days absent the time to procure hardware you might be in store for some problems.
• If the performance testing IQ is low, hunker down and prepare to educate your consumers.

These are not obstacles but rather, impediments that with swift and decisive action can be rectified. The timing as far as delivery may not be in your control; ever, but you can be prepared when everything you need comes into place.