SIGiST, March 18
This page supports the SIGiST workshop, and talks, delivered on 18 March.
Talk: Testing in an agile environment
This talk is supported by a 7500-word paper. Download the paper here.
You can bring this talk to your team - there's an offer on until 30 April. Details here.
Workshop: How to Diagnose Bugs
The course exercises and supporting materials are available here or for download. Note that the download is a zip file - you'll need to unzip it and open index.hml in your browser.
The slides are here. Don't distribute these slides yourself, or adapt them. If you would like to use the materials in your organisation, please ask for permission.
I expect to be running a full-day course in Experimentation and Diagnosis on May 17th, before LEWT on May 18th. This will be a cost-sharing course - we'll share the cost of the room and the food. If we can get the same room as I usually use, that will make it very good value indeed. If you'd like to be invited, please send me an email or call me, letting me know why you'd like to come. There will be some restrictions - for instance, I don't expect to have more than one person from any single organisation, and I expect that I won't have more than 12 people.
I mentioned a couple of references. Raj Jain's The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis (on Amazon) is good for details of experimental design in performance testing - you'll want ot look at part IV. My favourite is Bragg's Principles of Experimentation and Measurement, which is out of print, but still available via Amazon.
The graphing tool I was using was DataGraph - an example of its output is below. What's most useful to me is the way that one can explore the data and recognise patterns. It's got a bit of a learning curve - but 90 minutes spent with a dataset and its help text will be well spent. It's $29, and runs only on Macs.
This image is reduced on the page - click to open in its own window for full resolution
