WOPR8

WOPR8 was held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA on April 12-14, 2008, and was hosted by MITRE. Rob Sabourin was the Content Owner.

Attendees

Henri Amistadi, Charlie Audritsh, Scott Barber, Ross Collard, Dan Downing, Linda Hamm, Dan Gold, Andy Hohenner, Paul Holland, Karen Johnson, Bob Kaminski, Richard Leeke, Yury Makedonov, Wilson Mar, Jude McQuaid, Carlos Tadeu Panato Junior, Amit Patel, Eric Proegler, Raymond Rivest, Robert Sabourin, Roland Stens

Theme: Critical Incidents in Effective Performance Testing

Questions we are interested in exploring at WOPR8 include:

What critical Incidents lead to effective performance testing?

By sharing and attempting to understanding the critical incidents leading to effective performance testing we will explore how our craft can make an important contribution to all IT and Development projects.

A critical incident is an event, or incident, that forever changes the way an individual thinks about or conducts a task. For example, a critical incident in performance testing may be the time that you learned, by way of an embarrassing failure on go-live day, the importance of validating the available network bandwidth, even if the IT staff assures you that it is sufficient.

WOPR8 will be exploring all aspects of performance testing, including process, technologies, teams, tools, status reporting and stakeholder engagement. Some questions we are likely to address include:

In which experiences did performance testing made a difference?

In which experiences did performance testing fail to make a difference?

How were performance problems discovered?

What was their cause?

How did performance testing uncovered problems?

Was performance modeling effective?

Were performance testing tools an influence factor?

What has performance testing influenced and why?

Software Requirements, Design, Development?

System, Integration or Unit Testing?

Customer Service, Support or Maintenance?

Commercial success?

Exploring tester skills in performance testing?

Which testing skills lead to effective performance testing?

Exploring organizational and business aspects of performance testing?

How did the organization of the performance testing team lead to effective performance testing?

What about communicating results?

Influence of business context on performance testing?

Awareness?

Did terrible failures lead to effective testing?

What is the story?

How did you get business to support performance testing?

When performance testing could have been effective but the results were either not used or misunderstood?

WOPR8 will give working practitioners (testers) a chance to examine, discuss and brainstorm these questions.