Beautiful Testing

Wrap-Up

In this chapter, I’ve shared with you a series of formative episodes in my evolution as a performance tester. The fact that these are real stories from real projects that I worked on, and the fact that they were sequential over approximately 14 months, only makes them more powerful.

Several years ago, I learned a technique called critical incident analysis that can be used to identify common principles used on or applied to complex tasks, such as performance testing. I learned about this technique from Cem Kaner and Rebecca Fiedler during the third Workshop on Heuristic and Exploratory Teaching (WHET). We were trying to determine how effective this approach would be in identifying core skills or concepts that people use when testing software, which would then be valuable to build training around.

According to Wikipedia:

A critical incident can be described as one that makes a significant contribution—either positively or negatively—to an activity or phenomenon. Critical incidents can be gathered in various ways, but typically respondents are asked to tell a story about an experience they have had.

These stories are my critical incidents related to the importance of collaboration in performance testing. In these stories, a wide variety of performance testing challenges were tackled and resolved through collaboration: collaboration with other testers, collaboration with project management, collaboration with clients, collaboration with the development team, collaboration with ...