QA Bean

Today I want to discuss a popular topic regarding a difference between Load and Performance testing. Those two types of testing are commonly used together but there are several key differences between the two. To get a better understanding of the topic lets have a real life example from one of my clients and use it to explain the difference. I have worked for a client that was building an in-house web application that provides its customers with an option to select and order different products and services. The request was, before the up-coming release, to test the performance of their product. We started the task by trying and understand what they expect from performance point of view and then went through an exercise of defining what is captured by what test. The client said that they are looking to have about 900-1300 active users on the site at a given moment, and the expected response time (for a page to load) should be less than 5 seconds. With those details what are the t...

One of the hardest tasks is to give time estimation for a QA work. I believe that the main reason for that is the fact that QA work is unpredictable and dynamic by its nature, in other words any time slot can be filled with some helpful QA activities but not every QA activity gives enough added value to justify the time and money invested to execute it. So how we get a good estimation for QA?