Lawrence Nuanez's blog

I love Firefox add-ons. Love em, perhaps to a fault*. Here are a few of my favorites that I've used on load and performance testing projects.

* Ironically (for a discussion about using add-ons to enhance performance testing), add-ons can degrade Firefox's own performance. Having many add-ons active can turn Firefox into a remorseless memory-sucking monster. I've tried using a number of workarounds for keeping Firefox memory usage under control, but the best solution is to disable or uninstall as many add-ons as possible.

We here at ProtoTest enjoy our work greatly. We strive to provide great services for all of our customers. One reason we can do that is that we are tool agnostic. In other words, we don't partner with one tool vendor and do all our work with that vendor. Sure we have partnerships but none of them are exclusive. If we were tied to a certain vendor we might not have had the opportunity to work with Web Performance Inc. We have really enjoyed working with their tool - Load Tester.

Recently I was speaking with the VP of Engineering of a software company in Denver, CO. Since his company deals with many cellular phone companies, I asked him his thoughts on the recent report that listed cell phone companies near the bottom of most customer satisfaction surveys. He said he wasn’t shocked. I asked if that would ever change. He said he didn’t think it would. He said it would not change as long as customers tolerated poor cell service and dropped calls. But don’t all cell phone companies drop calls and have poor cell service? In the opinion of most the answer is yes.

Back in March we blogged about low cost load and performance testing options. Back in November 2008 we blogged about load testing in the cloud. It is amazing how quickly things can progress when you have very smart people charging the way. LoadStorm has in less than 1 year grown to over 2000 customers. Other cloud based load testing tools are also experiencing a rapid increase in customer base.

For many years it has been a generally accepted rule that software testing and development report to different managers and have an autonomy that allows each to counter balance the other. The thought was the only way to have truly objective testing done was to have the testers report to someone other than the development manager. They would report to someone who has equal clout as the development manager and could thus duke it out with the development manager if there was is issue.

Check out this URL - http://loadstorm.com/2009/load-testing-lawrence-nuanez-interview

This is an email interview Scott Price of LoadStorm conducted with Lawrence Nuanez. He shares his insights and testing expertise. In this email interview, Lawrence talks about his views on software testing, load testing, test automation, and off-shoring.

Over the last few weeks we have been talking a lot about load and performance testing. On January 23, 2009 we blogged a lot about low cost load and performance testing and how even in a bad economy smart companies make wise investments in such things as load and performance testing when it is necessary.

Over the last few years Cloud Computing has become more reliable and robust. Companies like Amazon, Mosso, and iCloud have taken cloud computing to the masses and more and more companies are taking notice of the power available at a relatively low cost.

All automated and load testing tools have a scripting language. Some use established languages - like VBScript others use proprietary languages that are similar to established languages but have their own flavor.

Conferences have been around for as long there have been companies. People have an intrinsic need to gather in groups to talk about what they do. Quality Assurance and Software Test people are no different. Conferences have popped up all over the world for such topics as automation, load and performance testing, vendor specific conferences, and just general QA conferences. Some of these are quite large and are attended by thousands of professionals. Some of these larger conferences invite well known speakers and vendors and have workshops that can cover many topics.