The Art of Application Performance Testing, 2nd Edition

Preface

When I published the original edition of this book in January 2009, I had no idea how popular it would prove to be within the performance testing community. I received many emails from far and wide thanking me for putting pen to paper, which was an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. This book was and still is primarily written for the benefit of those who would like to become performance testing specialists. It is also relevant for IT professionals who are already involved in performance testing, perhaps as part of a web-first company (large or small), especially if they are directly responsible for the performance of the systems they work with.

While I believe that the fundamentals discussed in the original edition still hold true, a lot has happened in the IT landscape since 2009 that has impacted the way software applications are deployed and tested. Take cloud computing, for example: very much a novelty in 2009, with very few established cloud vendors. In 2014 the cloud is pretty much the norm for web deployment, with on-the-fly environment spin-up and spin-down for dev, test, and production requirements. I have added cloud considerations to existing chapter content where appropriate.

Then consider the meteoric rise of the mobile device, which, as of 2014, is expected to be the largest source of consumer traffic on the Internet. I made passing mention of it in the original edition, which I have now expanded into a whole new chapter devoted to performance testing ...