I’ve just returned from Melbourne, where the inaugural Australia Testing Days 2016 (#ATD2k16) was held. I love these conferences. They are really what drives our community. In this case the TEAM Meetup Melbourne gave rise to the conference, which is new. Usually it’s the other way around, that smaller groups emerge from conferences. Nonetheless I thought it was a great success. People seemed to enjoy themselves and by the amount of participation I saw they were keenly interested too.
Lee (@therockerttester) put together a nice summary of the conference here and I certainly don’t have anything to add.
Oh…. one thing though, NZ was disproportionately present at the conference. I think it is tribute to the efforts we have all made in NZ to advance our profession. Thanks also to those that come to NZ and Australia from far away to help us, give us the ideas and strength to grow.
My talk at ATD2k16 was on Reaching Beyond Performance in an Agile World. Basically I talk about my vision of how performance testing and performance testers need to change to stay current and add value. The basic premise being that the classic performance testing we do today will be augmented by something that runs under the notion of Performance Testing in Production. But the word testing is severely misused here.
What I see happening is the involvement of performance testers in monitoring production through pilots, roll-outs, dark go-lives,… right up to full production. Performance testers add the deep knowledge they have of the application and it’s intricacies. The monitoring I am talking about is way beyond what DevOps/Operations teams usually would do. It focusses more on what the scrum teams want to see, what the business wants and lets the product owner judge the effectiveness of what she does. It extends the reach of what we do and extends what we see as performance.
I also touched on the subject of new tools that aid us in this endeavor. Tools that let us ask open questions that combine diverse data feeds. Not unlike a DataWarehouse but with a different intent. Time based and immediate and easily malleable.
Anyway I had a blast and I hope some of the ideas I presented gave the listeners new ideas that they can build upon.
Thanks TEAM for holding the conference and doing such an excellent job of it! Looking forward to the next one.
by
Oliver Erlewein
P.S. Thanks Lee for the pic 🙂
Hello Test World 