Candidate Seminar by Dr. Cor-Paul Bezemer

Speaker: Dr. Cor-Paul Bezemer
                Queen's University

Title: Improving the state-of-practice of performance testing

Date: Thursday, March 23rd, 2017

Time: 10:30 a.m

Place: EV3.309

ABSTRACT

Performance issues can have a disastrous impact on a
large-scale software system, making it of utmost importance to
thoroughly test the performance of a software system before it is
deployed. However, as I showed in a recent study, performance testing is
a neglected task in many open source systems. Traditionally, performance
testing is a task that is done by performance experts, rather than
software developers. Unfortunately, in many open source systems, such
performance experts are not available. In my research, I focus on
improving the state-of-practice of performance testing, by making
performance testing less ad hoc (i.e., easier, more systematic and
accessible) for software developers.

An important step towards improving the state-of-practice of performance
testing is to increase the awareness about potential performance issues
in a software system. As I show in the first part of this seminar, such
awareness can be increased by monitoring a deployed system and
visualizing its performance. In the second part of this seminar, I will
talk about several methods for making the design and execution of
performance tests, and the analysis of the results of these tests less
ad hoc. In the last part of this seminar, I will discuss my future plans
for improving the state-of-practice of performance testing.

BIO

Cor-Paul Bezemer holds a PhD from Delft University of Technology in the
Netherlands (2014, thesis title: "Performance Optimization of
Multi-Tenant Software Systems"). He currently works as a postdoctoral
research fellow in the Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL) at
Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Cor-Paul is an active member of
the SPEC RG DevOps Performance Working Group. His work has been
published at premier software and performance engineering venues such as
the ESEC-FSE, ICSME and ICPE conferences and the EMSE, JSS and JSEP
journals. His research interests cover a wide variety of software
engineering and performance engineering-related topics. In particular,
his research focuses on making performance testing less ad hoc for
software developers.