A Podcast Dedicated to Performance Testing and SRE

I just wanted to let you know all about the new TestGuild Performance and Site Reliability podcasts.

Here is a quick overview of what the show is all about as well as how it can help you.

TestGuild Automation Podcast

For those of you that don't know I'm Joe Colantonio from TestGuild. I also have a podcast called TestTalks which I recently changed to the TestGuild Automation Podcast.

For the past five years, I've been speaking with experts in the industry to cover all things automation related. In those years, I've covered topics around performance testing but notice that they are not as popular as the functional automation ones.

I also get complaints from a few folks saying they didn't think that performance testing should be part of the automation show.

I think automation is anything that can help a team do something quicker faster and more reliably, and I believe performance falls into that. But I understand some of the folks that have concerns, and they don't necessarily really want to know about performance testing.

Paul Grossman once told me he thinks testers that know both functional automation and performance testing are known as unicorns.

I hope to change that.

Performance Testing Online Conference

I think performance testing as a really critical piece of the software development process. We need to start shifting left performance testing in our software development lifecycle as we've done with the unit testing and integration testing and functional testing over the last couple of years.

Also, I wanted to target the right group and make sure I deliver what listeners expect. So I decided to create the TestGuild Performance Podcast dedicated 100 percent to just performance testing instead of mixing topics all in one show.

I also have been hosting online Guild Conferences for the last three years. One dedicated to automation testing called Automation Guild one dedicated to security testing called SecureGuild and one devoted 100 percent of performance testing called PerfGuild.

I thought having a podcast dedicated to just performance testing would be a great way for me to meet new experts in the performance field and learn more about performance testing myself.

So when I host the performance conference, I'm a little more educated and hip to what's been going on what's new and be able to facilitate those discussions a lot better.

It's also a way for me to force myself to keep learning which then helps me to spread that performance knowledge.

The podcast is also going to have the added benefit of helping me to create better PerfGuild conference. Since I have more performance experts, I can go to as speakers, and I will also know better topics to have as conference sessions that are popular based on episodes download numbers.

Hopefully, this will lead to more PerfGuild attendees, and more attendees lead to more performance awesomeness that people are taking to the teams, helping them with their performance efforts.

When I was pitching the idea for a podcast dedicated to just performance testing a lot of people didn't think it was a good idea. The typical response was there's not a lot of people doing performance testing, so why have a dedicated show?

Why don't more folks do performance testing?

Unfortunately, not many software engineering organizations are familiar with the needs of performance testing or even have the expertise to do it. Even worse, like most other shifts left testing efforts, hardly anyone is attempting to add this activity early enough in their software development lifecycle.

Also, the lack of performance testing training seems to be a significant roadblock that prevents teams from successfully executing performance testing. Sometimes just knowing where to start can be a challenge.

Many software engineers have asked why is performance testing even need, especially when you have solutions like Amazon that could scale up servers to infinity. Some say performance testing isn't required because you can simply auto-scale your applications at runtime.

But if you've done performance testing for any amount of time you know that performance issues can't be solved by throwing more resources at it.

Sadly many companies realize this way too late and sometimes with dire consequences like the loss of revenue, lost customers in lost confidence in the software. I think we can do better. That's why I created the new podcast devoted to performance testing.

About the TestGuild Performance Podcast

So really the full name of this show is going to be the TestGuild Performance and Site Reliability Testing podcasts. I'll probably call it the TestGuild Performance podcast, but I think. SRE is going to be a significant component of this.

We'll see how it evolves.

Folks that don't know software reliability engineering is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operation problems. And the main goals are to create scalability in highly reliable software systems. That's one of the main goals of performance testing as well.

SRE came out of Google. So I hope to have some folks from Google on the show to talk more about it.

All these reasons are why I created the TestGuild Performance Podcast.

So what can you expect?

You can expect a new show every Monday. Most of the time it will be an interview type style where I'm interviewing an expert/real hands-on practitioner that has real-world experience or an author of a book similar to what I'm doing on TestTalks.

So if you've listened to TestGuild Automation Podcast (formally TestTalks) in the past, it's going to be a similar format.

Episodes will last about 30 minutes or less.

Cool Performance Testing Sponsor

We also have an awesome sponsor which is SmartBear. And I'm really excited about that. I started using Smartbear products way back in the day when I was doing API testing using their product SoapUI. But they also have a cool new performance testing solution called LoadNinja that helps to make performance testing easier. So really proud to have them as a sponsor and have them on board.

They've already given me a lot of support behind the scenes and helped me get this up and running so really excited to have them as a partner on this show.

Let me Know What You Think

As always I'm always thinking of a community, and that's what the TestGuild is about. Everyone coming together to share a tip, tool, technique, or best practice that we implement right away to help improve our testing effort.

If you have a tip, tool, technique or best practice you'd like to talk about that's performance testing related send me an email at Joe @ TestGuild.com and maybe we'll get you on the show.

So that's a quick overview of what to expect from the TestGuild Performance podcast.

Let me know what you think.