Performance Testing is not Load Testing - Leandro Melendez

Software Testing Unleashed - Better Teams. Better Software. Better World.

How Performance Testing Has Changed: Insights, Challenges, and Best Practices Over 20 Years

Bonus Tipp: Never miss a crucial test again

"Nowadays with agile, with the cloud, kubernetes, environments that will Pop up and be destroyed completely. It's not the same game and I am a strong advocate of moving away from the old practices." - Leandro Melendez

In this episode, I talk with Leandro Melendez about how performance testing changed in the last20 years. Live at HUSTEF, we swap stories from bare metal and heavy browser scripts to APIs, cloud, and Kubernetes. Leandro draws a clear line between performance and load testing. Do not run Black Friday tests every sprint. Watch production, use canaries, and learn from real users. He pushes observability first. Build dashboards, instrument early, and think about cost.

Leandro is helping everyone to ramp up on their observability, QA and performance practices. He has over 20 years of experience in IT and over 15 in the performance testing practice where he served multiple S&P500 customers all over the USA, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India, Austria, etc. Author of the performance testing blog Señor Performo where he curates a diverse set of learning material for performance testers and engineers together with a couple of YouTube channels in Spanish and English. As well he hosts the PerfBytes español Podcast, and is a co-host on the main PerfBytes show since 2018. He is an international public speaker participating in multiple conferences, events and webinars, with keynotes, workshops and multiple talks on his belt. And last, author of The Hitchhikers Guide To Load Testing Projects, a fun walkthrough that will guide you through the phases or levels of an IT load testing project.

Highlights:

• Performance is not the same as load testing
• Performance testing moved from heavy UI scripts to APIs, cloud, and Kubernetes
• Avoid Black Friday tests in every sprint
• Put observability first and learn from real users
• Track cloud elasticity costs and measure spin up and spin down

Chapter

1. Evolution of Performance Testing (00:00:00)

2. Modernizing Performance Testing Practices (00:05:14)

3. Modern Load Testing Techniques (00:06:45)

4. Testing Capacity for Big Events (00:11:05)

5. Optimizing Cloud Performance Costs (00:15:07)

6. Dashboards Drive Project Success (00:18:59)

7. Embrace Multiple Tools for Success (00:20:58)