Praful Pillay - Vice President, Offshore Services, Sungard.
Performance Test Management
This paper discusses the management aspect of conducting performance testing. It briefly discusses the process, approach, and tools needed to make performance testing a repeatable and predictable process. The paper integrates the outcome of performance testing with the core development process. While the performance testing exercise requires specialized skills, the outcome of the test, which is a report, can be consumed by both the development teams and the end users.
This paper discusses the experiences of the author in setting up a Performance Management and Reporting process along with a Performance Test Lab. The paper attempts to encapsulate the experience in running this lab and in developing key components of this process. Development of the Performance Management and Reporting process helps leverage investments in performance testing tools, and test script assets.
The components of this process evolve over a period of time, as various challenges are addressed. The biggest challenge is to document application scenarios received from end users into key performance indicators against which actual performance can be measured. The second one is to manage expectations from the lab at the end user level, the development level, and the management level. One of the expectations is, of course, that the performance test report should make sense to different audiences.
Praful has 20+ years of multi-dimensional experience in developing software solutions, product engineering and implementation, and all aspects of project management. He has worked both in India and overseas in technical roles.
For almost 9 years he has been working on product realization services in an offshore model. He has been involved in many initiatives to implement best practices to deliver product engineering expertise effectively.
Specifically he has focused on Release Engineering practices that cover areas of application testing, performance testing, product packaging and documentation that form part of the last mile activities prior to releasing software to the market place.
He has experience in setting up divisions, planning staffing, and setting up recruitment drives to ramp up teams within committed time frames and as per budget. He has experience in defining project metrics, designing effective dashboards that become the basis for status reporting.
He also heads the Center of Excellence for Testing Services across whole of SunGard’s Offshore Services. Here, his responsibilities include strengthening testing practices, evolving test automation frameworks, and setting up and running performance testing labs. It also covers areas such as installation testing and platform testing.