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Why Performance Projects Fail?

Projects involving performance testing and engineering fail for a variety of reasons. The majority of performance project failures occur for various highly complex reasons from every phase of the development life cycle and performance testing life cycle. Sometimes, performance problems are uncontrollable, and it’s out of the control of a project manager, technical architects, or performance engineers. In my experience, from both business and personal levels, most the performance projects fail due to simply a lack of communication between performance engineers, developers, DBA's, business teams, and stakeholders from the beginning, and this ends up causing many other problems which will directly impact application performance and ROI. The only objective of strategic, effective performance testing for any application/product is to achieve a satisfactory return on investment. Performance testing and engineering the applications are risky and always require a lot of trial and error with rigorous testing from the early stages of development.

Failures in performance testing projects must be treated similarly to other business problems. It is essential to understand what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what can be done to prevent it. In most scenarios, the performance engineers have to run the one-man show role to make everyone educate/understand the performance challenges in the end-to-end full life cycle implementations. Working with Practice and COE teams, we continued seeing the same mistakes repeatedly from multiple teams and projects, so, based on my personal experience, I have compiled a  list of reasons Why Performance Projects Fail.

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Web Service Testing Using Neoload

In this tutorial, we will understand how to design SOAP and REST services using Neoload to validate the performance of web services.

Designing SOAP request in Neoload

Step 1: Create New Project (Go to File -> Click on New -> Enter Project Name -> Click Finish)

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10 Tips to Improve Automated Performance Testing in CI Pipelines (Part 1)

Here's 1 and 2 of the how you can create a better CI pipeline.

Getting testing right in a Continuous Integration pipeline is a critical part of software development at web scale. For many companies, it's a challenge, particularly with automated performance testing. It's not for lack of effort. Many companies can't seem to realize the full value of their efforts. The reasons are many. Some testing efforts merely reinvent the wheel. Others are conducted randomly with no apparent intention other than just for the sake of execution. Ensuring the testing is both appropriate and aimed at meeting the business requirement(s) is a distant afterthought.

It doesn't have to be this way.

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How Performance Testers Can Help Protect and Secure IT

In August of 2018 Bob Diachenko, Director of Cyber Risk Research at Hacken.io found that over 2 million Mexican citizens had their healthcare data leaked due to a security vulnerability in a system's database. At that same time, he found that the data of 93 thousand users of a popular babysitting app, Sitter, was also exposed. As if this isn't scary enough, in November, Marriott Corporation revealed that over the last four years hackers had broken into its reservation system and stealing the private data of over 500 million customers. That's more than the combined population of Russia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain combined!Securing and protecting.

Securing and protecting.

Given the security breaches that have occurred at places like Facebook (50 million profiles), Equifax (143 million), Yahoo (3 billion), eBay (145 million) and surprisingly, Adult Friend Finder (412 million), you'd think that companies would learn from one another. Many have, and yet, many have not. Data theft is still an all too common occurrence in the digital landscape. That's the bad news. The good news is that security has become a company-wide concern, not something relegated to a few compliance officers sitting in isolation in the data center. Companies have come to understand that everybody has a role in making sure that its digital infrastructure is secure and protected. This includes test practitioners and QA personnel.

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Accommodating Human Behavior in Automated Testing

Human error needs to be accounted for.


I'm a big fan of test automation. To me, it's the best way to get software out the door. For the most part, automation brings a degree of speed and accuracy to the testing process that in many cases surpasses human capability. This is particularly true when it comes to UI testing. Having a roomful of testers sitting at keyboards entering data in the UI and then recording results can be a bottleneck when implementing testing in today's enterprise.

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Three Killer Anti-Patterns in Continuous Performance Testing

Many developers have decided that building sustainable automated and continuous processes across the entire lifecycle, including performance engineering and testing, is a modern imperative. This article will highlight some important things to keep in mind when executing continuous performance testing. 

Are you ready?
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Avoid "Hurrying Up Just to Slow Down" Syndrome

There are a million causes of why we waste time. "Rework" isn't the only category in your value streams, not even close. Agile and iterative product teams often build prototypes to learn about the problem and to produce a useable product. While we could all improve planning and requirements gathering, we often find ourselves blocked from closing out work items by unanticipated dependencies and misaligned expectations.