Mastering Performance Testing: Best Practices
Performance Engineering Lead, ZS AssociatesDBDeep Barot
Founder, ContextQA (host)
Performance testing is really about user satisfaction — a slow app sends users straight to a competitor. This session explains how to embed performance work across the whole lifecycle, the major test types, the metrics that matter, tooling, baselines, and the shift-left future of performance engineering.
Walk away knowing how to apply it
What the conversation covers
Defining performance as user satisfaction (the payment-timeout example)
Embedding performance from requirements and design, not just at the end
Setting baselines around scalability and 10–20x future users
Who sets the baseline: people with visibility into future usage
Test types: load, volume, stress, spike, and endurance — and when to use each
Key metrics and an internal per-API response-time threshold
Tooling and record-modify-reuse scripting with realistic think-time
The ideas worth remembering
Performance is about user satisfaction — slow apps lose users in real time
Embed performance at every stage; the dedicated test should be a validation step
Baselines come from future-usage visibility, not a fixed day-one user count
Different goals need different (and combined) test types
By the time you reach performance testing, it should just be a validation activity — a lot needs to happen before.— Sandra John
Who you'll hear from
Sandra John
Performance Engineering Lead, ZS Associates
Deep Barot
Founder, ContextQA (host)
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