CMG Webinar Series – Calibrate Workload Model for Accurate Performance Testing

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What You’ll Learn:

Web performance testing, in short, is to simulate real user access workloads and web system behavior in a test environment. The real user access patterns are changing dramatically in today’s public facing websites and provide many challenges to existing performance testing best practices. Performance engineers often spend significant time building and validating performance test workload models with their best effort and knowledge. The reality is the workload models used in performance testing often miss their real-world workload targets due to missing “significant non-critical” web usage and lack of accurate workload model validation processes. The accuracy of workload models directly reflects the understanding and simulation of real production web application usage patterns in testing. Without an accurate workload model, not only will performance test results be incorrect, but also many of following tasks — performance bottleneck recreation, server performance tuning, capacity planning, or application framework validation — will have inaccurate targets. From this webinar, I will walk you through a practical way of building accurate performance workload models that match the targeted production workload much more closely compared to the workload model process in the current performance testing practice. The accurate workload model and the subsequent performance test results will bring higher confidence of the web application performance for the new releases to project teams and upper management.

About the Presenters:

Benjamin Mao,
Randstad USA

Benjamin Mao is currently a Performance Architect at Randstad USA. He has been guiding large clients on the accurate performance testing methodology and best practice for accurate performance assessment of web apps of all sizes. Benjamin Mao has 20 years of experiences in IT where he performed various roles of developer, software engineer, lead, architect in web app development and performance tuning. He had developed an accurate performance testing methodology and practice to fill out a gap in performance testing practice when its moving from mainframe/client-server/intranet to public facing internet world. Besides being a web performance thinker, he enjoys poem writing, custom home building, singing, dancing.

Kevin Mobley,
The Ian Thomas Group, LLC

Mr. Mobley is a Six Sigma Black Belt with fifteen years experience creating software systems for Fortune 1000 companies in the entertainment, financial services, government, retail and travel sectors. Mr. Mobley is the Chief Executive Officer of The Ian Thomas Group, LLC (ITg) where he is responsible for strategic direction and implementation of Software Performance Engineering services. ITG provides strategic and tactical software performance engineering and deployment services to organizations deploying complex software systems. Bank of America, Capital One and Bank Leumi are leveraging The Ian Thomas Group’s services and methodology during the replacement of their retail software architectures.

Prior to The Ian Thomas Group, LLC, Mr. Mobley was the Director of software performance engineering at Fidelity Information Services. Mr. Mobley managed performance engineering of complex multi‐tier HTTP, XML, J2EE and mainframe financial services CRM system throughout the life cycle of both product development and more than 25 complex customer implementations. Mr. Mobley’s team increased the application throughput over 1300% of both the core Sales and Service and Teller Channel applications, and the XES service oriented architecture middleware. Mr. Mobley developed a holistic application performance management application and installed the application at Fidelity’s customers to enable proactive discovery and root‐cause analysis of real‐time application performance degradation and error conditions.

During the 1990’s, Mr. Mobley was Director of the Performance Engineering Center of Excellence and chief performance architect at iXL, Inc., and a systems engineer at Science Application International Corporation (SAIC), Georgia Institute of Technology and Lockheed Martin Corporation.