Like many consultants, with the melting of the economy last fall I spent the latter part of 2008 and the first half of 2009 underutilized. So naturally, as the the number of new engagements increases recently (yes!), so does the amount of billable work (also yes!), but unfortunately time spent reading, writing, creating and just thinking tails off (no!).Thus explains the absence in blog posts here - I’m running three engagements now and finding the time to do the fun stuff is difficult. But in the trenches of daily project delivery, there’s a few highlights that I think are worth sharing:
Performance Testing in the Cloud
The new class of SaaS performance test tools arriving are very interesting, in terms of both capabilities and costs. I found Mike Kavitz’s blog post on this subject interesting and through a mutual friend got in touch with him. During our call he told me about the performance testing for the system he was architecting. The volume was astounding - proving out the architecture with one million concurrent transactions! With the solution under test hosted in the cloud, and the testing tool also hosted in the cloud, they could do extremely large scale testing for a fraction of what it would have costs 3 years ago. The setup he used would have cost tens of millions of dollars (or more) a few years ago, now his bill is in the thousands because of the cloud. Simply amazing.
I’m using a much more modest tool for my project, Load Impact, an affordable in-the-cloud performance testing tool. I did some analysis on test tools before I started, but wound up selecting Load Impact for their price/performance. I recently used it for load testing a client’s web site and it worked out quite well. I had my first load test up and running in literally 5 minutes. There’s definitely a ramp-up curve for recording, editing and creating test scripts - and learning what all the different parameters mean - but nothing too complex. In less than 4 days working very much part-time, I was able to do 10 runs of increasing complexity against our client’s web site and ascertain what level of load it could handle before response times started to deteriorate. This was valuable information used to set expectations for rollout.
Pivotal Tracker
I’ve become a big fan of this tool. When I teach teams agile, I always start with index cards on walls to introduce the basic agile practices. But my teams these days are virtual and I find Pivotal Tracker (PT for short) the simplest mechanism to manage stories so we all have the same view. I can give my client a CSV dump of our stories at milestones and also provide read-only access to the schedule that updates dynamically (this is handy on conference calls when we prioritize the stories). Overall a great tool that I’m enjoying and the price is right!
Unfuddle
I’ve used Unfuddle for over a year and continue to enjoy their hosting services. I can browse the source repository (Subversion or Git) and see color-coded diffs of each commit. When branching it makes it easy for me to verify exactly what will be delivered to the client through visual confirmation. I’ve found the notebooks, a collection of Wiki-pages, useful for documenting release processes and audit logs. And like PT, I can provide our client read-only access to the repository so they can fetch weekly code drops from the branches.
Although Unfuddle has a superb issue tracking system, on my current project I’m not using it because I prefer to keep bugs tracked alongside stories in PT - having everything in one place makes it easier for our entire team to review during stand-ups and me to keep track of what issues have been resolved.
OK, so I promise not to let this much time elapse again without a post. I’ve got an article coming out soon on gantthead.com and a book review of a new book on Business Value of Agile, so there should be plenty to write about in the weeks ahead.
