Performance testing
I have led many forms of large-scale performance testing, often requiring large amounts of physical infrastructure. Minimising hardware and avoidance of overloading the test environment have been key.
Control Center suite
As team manager I guided the testers on the test approach and in setting up the test environment.
The Control Center client software can display up to 100 live and recorded video streams. Challenges overcome for this testing are providing the data from cameras reliably over a network with data rates into the client PC at 400Mbps, obtaining suitable PCs for conduct of the tests, suitable video feeds and assessment of results.
This testing has encountered limits of CPU, memory, PCIe bus speed, graphics card performance, networking and OS.
Testing of Enterprise and Large Enterprise NVRs (network video recorders) with recording rates of up to 1.6Gbps and storage from 40TB to 200TB+ has required careful construction of the tests and test environment.
This testing has identified issues with OS memory management, OS limits, NIC performance, SAN performance and networking characteristics.
Agilent testing
I encouraged a robust and rigorous approach to performance testing and provided input to cross team working group to isolate issues related to CPU cache memory when muliple software products were used together.
pSS7 signalling capture and storage. I liaised with test tools development team to enhance their tool to the project testing needs. Produced test data using test scripts that showed fundamental flaw in product architecture.
Motorola Tetra System Stress & Stability
I planned and led team responsible for performance testing a regional/national emergency services radio network. This testing was conducted as part of the Airwave project which is used across all UK Emergency Services. The testing was conducted according to client requirements up to levels that reflect a major emergency
I specified and developed automated tests and test tools in conjunction with the testers in my team, and the test tools development team.
We created a test harness that:
- Generated calls from 80 real handsets into 3 radio sites
- Simulated calls from 10000 handsets on 53 simulated radio sites
- Generated data traffic and multiple forms of speech traffic up to and beyond the traffic capacity of the radio network