The Performance Testing PlayBook
Overview
Are your performance tests giving you false confidence?
Every week, teams ship software that passed performance testing - and then watch it collapse under real traffic. The tests ran. The results looked fine. Production failed anyway.
The Performance Testing Playbook is a practitioner's field guide for software engineers and QA leads who are done with performance tests that tick boxes but protect nothing. Written for the real world - not the textbook - this playbook draws on documented industry failures, hands-on tooling guidance, and hard-won engineering principles to help you build tests that actually reflect how your system behaves under pressure.
What you'll learn:
- Why most performance tests are fundamentally useless - and the five specific mistakes that make them so
- How to choose the right test type (load, stress, soak, spike, breakpoint) for every scenario
- Workload modelling techniques that reflect real user behaviour - not artificial traffic patterns
- A complete JMeter field guide: thread groups, samplers, assertions, correlation, and the mistakes that silently invalidate your results
- k6 for modern teams: JavaScript scripting, thresholds as code, and CI/CD integration that makes performance a continuous gate - not a last-minute check
- How to read the metrics that matter: p95, p99, throughput, error rate, and saturation - and what each one hides
- A systematic approach to finding and fixing bottlenecks using APM data and request tracing
- How to translate performance results into business risk - and present findings that actually drive decisions
Real incidents. Real lessons.
From the $1.7 billion Healthcare.gov collapse to Knight Capital's $440 million trading catastrophe - this book grounds every principle in documented failures that show exactly what is at stake when performance testing is treated as a formality.
Whether you are preparing for your first major launch, integrating performance into a CI/CD pipeline, or trying to convince stakeholders that p99 latency is a business problem - this playbook gives you the framework, the tools, and the language to do it right.
Who this book is for: Software engineers, QA leads, DevOps engineers, and engineering managers who want performance testing that produces valid, actionable results - not just green dashboards.
This item is Non-Returnable
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798252304731
- ISBN-10: 9798252304731
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: March 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.44 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.62 pounds
- Page Count: 206
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