Even applications that have gone through rigorous testing in QA tend to have serious performance problems in production. Nearly every CIO or production manager has horror stories of applications that went live and failed. Yet with so much on the line, why are we in a constant firefighting mode? When confronted with new problems, we have to start with the basics and ask, "Is the problem in the application or in the infrastructure? How can I narrow it down fast?" Production tuning takes your good QA practices to the next level, and helps you get out of firefighting mode.

What is meant by Internet realism during load testing/capacity assessment? Part of it is understanding the importance of not only carefully characterizing the behavior of visitors to a Web site, but also the behavior of the Internet itself. Contributing to this realism are important measures such as packet loss, link speeds, millions of IP addresses, browser emulation, SSL, and other factors that can cause significant performance issues. The Internet has all these issues, and testing with these values is an important part of gaining a clear picture of system performance right from the start. Philip Joung shows you the different factors and how each one can have a significant impact on your site's performance.

If you oversee a mission-critical Web site, you want to be able to predict how many users you can handle within acceptable response times. Here are three fundamental load testing concepts you can't do without.

The preparation of a realistic, practical project schedule is an essential management function for obtaining stakeholder commitment, setting expectations, and communicating within the team and organization what is achievable. Doing this preparation well is another challenge-one that must be conquered. Rex Black helps participants see the bigger project scheduling picture by focusing on issues such as constituent tasks, the underlying dependencies between them, and the risks attached to the completion of those tasks.