Performance - Part 5
April 30, 2009 · by Kevin Runde
Performance Tuning – Being scientific and being human
You are moving along, making baby steps towards your goal of ultimate speed and efficiency. Hopefully, all your tests and data have made it easier to get everyone on board. I’ve always found it has in the past. Sure, maybe you need to do some more tests with new metrics to make others happy, but that is a good thing?
It either helps you know what you don’t know or helps enforce what you already know. Every so often stop though. Step back. Are you still moving toward your goal or are you getting side tracked in running test that don’t actually prove anything. While I do promote lots of test there usually becomes a point where you are running tests just to run them. Do not do that. If you are busy analyzing results and coding changes then don’t run tests just because you have a system available to run tests on. If you are on a team with dedicated testers this will give them a break or allow you to let others use the testing equipment for a bit. Being scientific is a good thing, but look at most of the real scientist in the world. They are not usually people persons. You need the people around you to work with you. Sometimes being scientific you come off as being uncaring. You need to make sure you are still treating everyone as a human being. This can be as simple as sitting down with people and talking with them about how great it will be when the system performs and you can move on to the next project instead of the latest data you gathered. I’ve also often found being scientific for too long can drain the motivation out of people because it limits creativity. Watch out for this and try to reenergize people and yourself by doing something fun like going out to lunch or asking others about their hobbies and what they would do if they were not running tests in the middle of the night.
Also use these times to watch the people around you. You don’t know what you don’t know! Are these people really doing their jobs or are they just coasting along from pay check to pay check. How much can you really trust them. Lets face it we all blowing things off from time to time. It’s human nature. So how can you tell if the people around you are? Interact with them! If you have someone else creating the performance tests sit down with them. Walk through everything they are doing for a few tests. If you need to simulate users logging into a site are they using a correct sample of users OR are they using 5 users over and over again that don’t reflect what will be seen in production. For example if production will have 1000s of different users in the app at a time are the testers only using 2 or 3? If so your tests may be invalid because the system is caching the user data and reusing it, or maybe a back end system is artificiality slow because those users have a lot of permissions which take a while to load. You can’t assume your tests are valid until you have examined them and validated that they truly reflect what you are expecting in production.
At the same time though don’t be a jerk to people. You need to work with these people. Also at sometime you are going to need to run that test that no one else thinks is important, but helps you to validate an assumption you have. That will be easier if everyone is getting a long.
-Kevin
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