Systems & Software Talk 

1. This is not rocket science.
2. Any monkey can do this.
3. Why didn’t we think of this sooner? (It is a good sign that they are yet using "we" instead of "you".)

You just happen to be in the ATF Zone (All-Too-Familiar)! While this is not about the real ATF - Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, this situation and your location in the development life cycle can be just as dramatic and intriguing, and – any one or more of those items might come in handy!

While you are not an ordained minister, you agreed to bless the application – within the required timelines. (What were you thinking???) You also mumbled that blessings might not be appropriate. The PM’s eyeball rolling was an acknowledgement to your mumbling.

1. Risk notebook ready for input.
2. Caveat recipes access – enabled.
3. Reflecting sunglasses ready for encounters with project non-friendlies where eye contact with the host’s searing laser-emitting pupils may blind you.
4. Fact-finding map at the ready.
5. Popular IT-clichés/questions counters below reset:

• Kick-the-tires counter = 0
• Circle-the-wagons counter = 0
• Well what are the industry standard page load specs counter = 0

• That the only capacity planning information available on the project was on napkins – napkins marked "Dimpy’s Bar & Grille". Perhaps the napkin user was testing his or her capacity for alcohol. There were no dates or version markings. The ink had coalesced with the cheeseburger grease wiped from the consumer’s mouth. You could still make out the partial words "pe..orm" and "b.tt.r."
• That there were no performance specifications. You dig deep into bio-RAM and find an appropriate melodyric, and alter it to fit the occasion. "I don’t care what they say, I won’t stay in a world without specs." Thank you Peter & Gordon.

• That there were no service-level agreements with the customer base.
• That swimming upstream into the development life cycle to get any information about performance proved futile. Architects, BAs, SAs, DBAs, and Developers – all looked at you as if you had asked them to join your multi-level marketing company down-line.
• There were no performance measurements made anywhere upstream, therefore there was no factual evidence to indicate how this baby may or may not perform. No one seemed to be the least bit concerned except the PM.
• That the people within the company trained in CPR were truly trained as they had to resuscitate you from near drowning in Lake Sorrow at least four times.

You have:

1. Provided a performance test specification capture document to the requestor.
2. Requested and received an approximate concurrently executing user count that clearly indicates the need for a simulation tool such as QALoad or LoadRunner.
3. Discovered that all simulated users will need to be authenticated against an LDAP server.
4. Arranged for a Proof-Of-Concept recording session with the appropriate team member to determine if your performance test tool is a fit.
5. Acquainted yourself with the application a bit after you acquired power-user credentials. This experience made you wonder if this app was running on a 750 KHz 8-bit microprocessor with 4 KB RAM. ß Big clue!
6. Studied system and network architectural diagrams.
7. Made the appropriate requests to have your monitoring account setup on servers so your tool could pull server health counters.
8. Discovered that the database will be sized as production and populated with production data and that you need not be concerned with SOX or any other data confidentiality issues. (Boy are we making this easy!)
9. Updated and circulated your resume’.

1. LoadRunner/PerformanceCenter
2. More than one controller
3. Many thousands of Virtual User Licenses
4. A load farm of tens of servers
5. OpenSta
6. Opnet’s IT-Guru/ACE
7. VBScript Utilities:
8. Reusable code for making ODBC connections and queries.
9. LoadRunner Vuser log file parsers
10. You have access to HP-OpenView

What Will You Do?

Reminder:

• You need to make a statement about the performance of this application and architecture. You have less than a week to accomplish something that ordinarily takes about three weeks at a minimum.