Drew, Playing the "uncertainty" card is defintely a very good move. As you mentioned, "higher ups" and "owners" don't like to deal with the "unknown", and sometimes this can be a good approach.
Celeste -----Original Message----- From: Drew Falkman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 10:39 AM To: JRun-Talk Subject: RE: load testing (was RE: Difficult To Reproduce Session Issue) I have not, quite frankly, worked in a corporate environment. But as a consultant I often face the same issues - not just with load testing, but also with general code tuning and upgrading the applications I have created. It's almost an impossible sell to convince a customer they need to spend more money and not be able to "see" the results. Celeste, this is probably old hat to you, but for others lurking, I have found some good approaches to convincing upper management that code tuning is important (these would be the same issue for load testing): 1. Track regular performance during regular traffic. Maybe take screenshots of perfmon or log performance heuristics so you can easily create graphs of performance throughout the day. IF you have SNMP monitoring tools, use them (some are pretty reasonably priced). Sometimes simply illustrating the fragility of an environment will make upper management afraid and want to know more. You could probably put together some of this preliminary stuff in a couple hours. 2. Present the above along with "what-if" scenarios (like what if a hard drive blows, or what if we get 500 users simultaneously), and explain that without load testing you simply cannot know what will happen. Most upper management types simply don't deal well with uncertainty (think of how you are always needing to give accurate assesments of the time it will take to do project X). If you illustrate that you don't know what will break first under heavy loads or what the breaking point is, that will often help. 3. The reality is that given the two points above most people will agree that load testing *would* be a good idea, but will often say that they simply don't have the time or the money to invest in it. "Let's do it next year." is not an uncommon response. The only way to get around this is to speak their language: ROI. Return on Investment. Calculating ROI, especially with something like this, is not easy and often arbitrary. But basically you need to put together the cost of doing load testing (hours + software, if necessary). Then, put together the costs for a couple scenarios. One should be the cost of the applications server going down. Estimate the amount of time it would take you to rebuild your environment. Now, add in dollars for the amount of sales lost while your server is down. Add more for the confidence lost by customers who tried to visit your site during downtime (this can be large, imagine if 100 customers never return at $100/yr/customer). Give a cost scenario during a promotion. Again, explain that this is pretty much inevitable if you don't know at what point your application will break and where. It might be good to do one that is a little less severe (people tend to think that the tragedies won't happen to them, but might believe that the server will get bogged down and you will have to spend time to troubleshoot and tune code and waste a lot of time because it is less drastic). 4. Lastly, sometimes use a promotion or current project to spur it. Simply asking what kind of traffic is expected from an upcoming promotion opens the door to you to say: "Are you sure we can handle that much?". If you follow that up fairly quickly by saying you could find out by doing some load testing will illustrate that you know what you are doing and also that you are nervous about the upcoming promotion (which should make them nervous, as well). Just some thoughts. Drew Falkman Author, JRun Web Application Construction Kit http://www.drewfalkman.com/books/0789726009/ -----Original Message----- From: Haseltine, Celeste [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 8:11 AM To: JRun-Talk Subject: RE: load testing (was RE: Difficult To Reproduce Session Issue) Charles, My response wasn't directed at just "what to do when the bosses don't listen", but also how to "not push your ideas to the point that you alienate the bosses you are trying to convince". Again, unless you are an officer of a company, or are the owner, you are often NOT in a "decision making" role. Therefore, the only thing you can do is to try and convince people to test a product before deployment. But you can't force your bosses to do something. And if you try to do so, you will risk your job and your professional reputation. Again, manpower issues and money issues are the key here. Even if the tools are free, it takes the use of "x man-hours" to test a product, when those "x man-hours" could be used towards something viewed as "more profitable" or more important to the company by upper management. This is especially true when you are in a very small shop as I am. I can push all I want, but if I push too much, I run the risk of alienating the very people I am trying to convince. And if I do alienate my "bosses", what have I gained for my group and "my cause"? Nothing. In fact, by pushing too far, I could end up hurting my group and my "cause" more, by not giving my management team a "graceful out" once they realize that I was probably right all along. This is called politics. And the higher you move up as an IT professional, the more important the "how well you play the political game" becomes vs. "how often you are right and your boss is wrong". Perhaps someone else on this list has a better approach to convincing their management team for taking the time and the money to do things such as testing. I'm always interested in hearing other/better approaches. But for me, this is the way I have approached all "opposition" to any IT recommendation that may be viewed as "not necessary, too costly, etc.", testing included. As I mentioned before, people and companies both make mistakes, and hopefully learn from them. Sometimes you just have to let your upper management make what you know is a decision that will probably come back to haunt them, and then just move forward from that point on. Celeste -----Original Message----- From: charles arehart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2002 1:10 AM To: JRun-Talk Subject: RE: load testing (was RE: Difficult To Reproduce Session Issue) Well, those are all good thoughts, Celeste, and surely helpful to many. But my point wasn't "what do we do if the bosses don't listen" so much as "why aren't we pushing testing (especially load testing) more". I think there's a sense in many that it's not important, or it's too difficult, etc. While it's true that many sites may not get thousands (or tens of thousands) of hits in a day, it's reasonable for one getting just hundreds to get several at once, and there are clearly issues (like the one that touched off this thread) that may be triggered with just such a low level of load. If I seem to be on a bit of a bandwagon for load testing, even for "smaller shops", I am. And as has been pointed out, cost of tools isn't really the issue. I'm curious for the kinds of arguments against it that have either kept people from pursuing it or, even in the face of these assertions of the low costs and good benefits, why they would still say "nah, not going to bother". /charlie > -----Original Message----- > From: Haseltine, Celeste [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 10:55 AM > To: JRun-Talk > Subject: RE: load testing (was RE: Difficult To Reproduce Session Issue) > > > Charlie, > > I just try to point out the business cases for testing. With many > owners/managers, it comes down to money and time, with time also being > related to money. As a professional, I ALWAYS write up my > business case in > a 1 page summary, which hits the highlights as to why ANY > software product, > internet or otherwise, should be tested. <snip> ______________________________________________________________________ Your ad could be here. 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