Java Microbenchmarking

Working late on preparing a performance test tomorrow, I stumbled over something called microbenchmarking. The idea is to put small performance tests within you code to evalute the system. This gives you the liberty of extracting performance measurements regardless of what environment the platform runs in (i.e. your development desktop vs. testing vs. production).

There are an awful lot of obvious (and perhaps not so obvious) things not to do while microbenchmarking. Consider e.g. if you should invoke any large or small load, what layer to stress, when to do this ..

I'm implementing this as a JBoss MBean, which will let me invoke a test suite with a HTTP request, and get a "ping"-style timer response.

I'll post my results later if this happens to be an interesting feature.

NDC 2010 accept

Against all odds (?) - Mortens and my paper ("Modularization, Testing & Technical Debt in a Large Agile Project") was accepted for the Nordic Developer Conference 2010. Well then, even though it's experiences from a Java project presented at a .Net conference, both sides has the agile dimension in common.

But it's still somewhat comical to present in "the dragon's lair". The presentations is scheduled for day 2, track 2 at 11:40 - in parallel to Eric Evans .. yikes.

The abstract reads:

This experience reports focuses on the major scrum–related technical challenges that arose during a 120 000 hour scrum controlled project. For each of them, we try to identify the cause and the consequence, and then follow up with any solutions we tried. Finally we sum up and assess whether the problem was successfully solved or not.

In addition, my colleague Filip van Laenen was accepted with his presentation "Distributed Computing 2.0". See http://www.ndc2010.no