48: Mark Tomlinson: A Bucket Full of Bottlenecks

For the majority of Mark’s career he has worked for companies as a testing practitioner and consultant using the leading products for performance testing, profiling and measurement. He has also consistently established close ties and relationships with the major vendors who create these tools.

Mark worked for six years at Microsoft Corporation as a performance consultant and engineer in the Microsoft Services Labs, in the Enterprise Engineering Center and in the SQL Server labs. His efforts to foster the success of Microsoft’s top-tier Enterprise customers was focused on their early adoption of Microsoft products as part of mission-critical operations. In 2008, as the LoadRunner Product Manager at HP Software Mark led the team to deliver leading innovations for performance testing and engineering as part of HP's suite of performance validation and management products.

Mark now offers coaching, training and consulting to help customers adopt modern performance testing and engineering strategies, practices and behaviors for better performing technology systems. He is the co-founder and host of the popular podcast PerfBytes.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Performance Testing is a team effort
• When engineers are doing spring planning around what the story should be to never talk about any physical properties. Just talk about time and volume.
• What if happens is a wonderful contemplative question because it starts from the point of exploration
• There is nothing eviler then a crashing website
• How to determine what a realistic response time is for your application's functionality
• Make sure you collaborate with the different sprint teams on the common performance bottlenecks that you find
• Production has become more fluid and open so the ability to virtualize something in production is now possible.
• There are other kinds of bottlenecks that are not specific to scale that you can still find using more of a trending over time model
• Don't lose sight of the end user's experience
• Much, much more!

Resources

• Every Computer Performance Book: How to Avoid and Solve Performance Problems on The Computers You Work With
  Bob Wescott
• Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
  Microsoft Corporation
• Speak Easy is a voluntary program designed to increase diversity in tech conferences through dedicated conference spots, mentoring and events. @spkeazee
• PerfBytes is a MUST listen to the podcast hosted by Mark Tomlinson and James Pulley that covers all things performance testing related

Connect with Mark

• Twitter: @mtomlins
• Blog: http://mtomlins.blogspot.com/
• Podcast: www.perfbytes.com

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