One thing I’ve seen teams struggle with is including Performance Testing earlier in their software development lifecycle. In this episode we’ll talk with Paola Rossaro, CTO of Nouvola about how performance testing can become part of your continuous deployment life cycle, helping you achieve faster deployment of scalable applications.

About Paola Rossaro

Paola is Co-Founder and CTO at Nouvola. She also loves seeing data and distributed systems in action, working flawlessly. Her career has spanned leadership roles at Teachscape and Wind River where she was responsible for the teams ensuring distributed enterprise application testing and monitoring (ie: making sure everything works flawlessly). She loved it so much her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering didn’t seem to take it far enough, so she continued post-doc work at UC Berkeley in real-time network performance.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• (On being a company founded by women) Yeah well it is probably changing but at least you know people are talking more about this stuff than it was even just 10 years ago let’s say. And I have to say it is a challenge. It is not an easy thing. There’s a lot of bias. Most of it is subconscious. I think a lot of people that we were told to. And sometimes I feel even myself I might have some bias when I when you see the certain behavior and I think I felt this bias in several situations. And so you just had to deal with it that way. There isn’t too much you can do the only thing you can do is just to prove that you can do it that you are better than others and that you have the energy and stamina to continue that. So I think the most important thing. And I think women in a way have more passion you know and that when they carry on a task. And I think that is something that it’s very important when you’ve built a start-up. The passion is definitely one of the major factors that keep you going.
  
• I see testing and performance testing as well as part of that DevOps activities. There are different ways that people define DevOps. I actually was talking to someone recently who said “Well, our DevOps team doesn’t communicate well with development”. And I  said well then that is not DevOps
  
• If you have a smaller environment that you are testing in that is smaller than your production environment and you already have issues there that’s a key indicator that you’re going to have problems in the larger environment.
  
• Performance testing I think is not something in isolation I think is probably one of the key concepts of DevOps in that there is basically a synergy in every single step of the software lifecycle. And that’s true also for. The performance testing.
• People are moving away from older tools and older solutions that are kind of slowing down their approach to DevOps. So that is definitely a trend that we see who we do see.
  
• Well the actionable advice that I would give is to test, test ,and test. It’s not just performance testing but any type of testing. So iteration is also important. So do your testing, improving and repeat.
  

Connect with Paola Rossaro

• Twitter:@prossaro
• LinkedIn:paolaros
• Company:nouvola.com

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