Stijn Schepers

Accenture

My talk is an inspiring talk about how DevOps has changed the life of a performance tester. Moving from a classical Waterfall Approach to DevOps (Agile) had a significant impact on the way performance testing is done. This talk is my personal journey. The journey starts in the Magritte museum in Brussels where I wanted to see his most famous painting: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe!”.

What intrigued me most was a video of Marcel Broodaerts: “La pluie”. In this black-white video, you see Broodaerts sitting outside in front of a table with an ink pot and a blank piece of paper. He starts writing and his technique is perfect! The characters on the piece of paper are just simply art! But suddenly it starts raining. His writing technique is still perfect, but the result of his writing is just not there. The rain ruins the art! After I watched this movie I realized that as a Performance Engineer I have felt like this for many years.

Trying to deliver Performance Testing for huge programmes of work based on a waterfall approach has been painful. Performance Testing started way too late so there was no room for technical improvements. Luckily with DevOps and Rapid Delivery of features into production, performance testing has become meaningful and my job became so much more rewarding.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how DevOps has changed the life of a performance tester
• Move from classical Waterfall approach to DevOps
• Sharpen your performance testing