Beyond performance testing part 1: Introduction
Performance testing is the discipline concerned with determining and reporting the current performance of a software application under various parameters. My series “User experience, not metrics” discusses and demonstrates how to do it, with the help of the IBM® Rational Suite® TestStudio® system testing tool. Computers excel at this stuff, crunching numbers and displaying answers in neat ways. But there comes a time after the tests are run when someone who’s reviewing the results asks the deceptively simple question, “So what, exactly, does all this mean?!?” This point beyond performance testing is where the capabilities of the human brain come in handy.
“Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain’s strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it,” writes British journalist Jeremy Campbell in Chapter 16 of Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life (1982).
