HP Discover 2012 (Las Vegas)

This year HP Discover will run from June 4-7 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. The conference will cover HP’s (and partners’) solutions for software, hardware, services, and networking. The hot buzzwords appear to be: cloud, mobility, and DevOps, with not so much Agile this year and only one mention of Web 2.0.

As I am really just interested in topics related to Performance Testing, I have made a shortlist of the sessions relevant for people like me, so you don’t have to wade through the session catalogue (which has more than 800 sessions).

There are quite a few interesting sessions scheduled this year…not least my own session, “Extending VuGen 11.5 with custom add-ins“. Please come and say “hi”.

Hopefully some of the local performance testers will organise another LoadRunner BBQ. I will post the details to my Twitter feed once I hear what is happening.

Update: The conference has finished, and I have posted my notes in a comment on this page.

Monday (June 4th)

Monday will be the HP Partner Summit, with no presentations for non-partners.

Tuesday (June 5th)

Tuesday is the first real day of the conference. The keynote session with Jeffrey Katzenberg (CEO and Co-Founder of DreamWorks) might be interesting. The official entertainment for Tuesday night will be a sneak preview of Madagascar 3.

TruClient confessions

Session ID: TB1998
Speaker: Scott Parker (Seagate)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Tuesday 11:15 AM

TruClient is HP’s latest technology for making performance-test scripting faster, more stable over time, and more accessible to a broader audience. Join representatives from Seagate and learn about their experience in using this new tool on several load-test projects. Presenters will share a catalog of their findings about TruClient, explain its solid advantages, and propose future enhancements. You’ll also come away with tips and tricks that can help make your TruClient load tests go more smoothly.

Scott gives his job title as “Load Test Kahuna”, so this might be an amusing talk.

Mobile Cloud: extending functional and performance testing to mobile

Session ID: TB2154
Speaker: Charaka Kithulegoda (ING Direct), Eran Yaniv (PerfectoMobile), Gal Tunik (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Tuesday 11:15 AM

Due to the extremely dynamic and fragmented nature of the mobile market, maintaining the quality of business-critical mobile applications has become a daunting task. Mobile applications must be compatible with a broad range of platforms and networks, and require shorter development cycles and continuous QA to minimize risk and reduce time to market. Attend this session and learn how to extend your existing HP testing tools to test mobile applications via the cloud. We’ll show you how you can perform automated functional and regression testing on real mobile devices and emulators using HP Unified Functional Testing (QuickTest Professional), execute mobile performance testing with LoadRunner, and continue managing your test cases with HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). We’ll also present the considerations on selecting a mobile testing solution and explain the proven benefits of leveraging your existing ALM framework and workflows. The session includes a case study presented by a Fortune 500 financial enterprise that seamlessly extended its HP Functional Testing to support automated mobile testing. You’ll get an inside look at real-life requirements and considerations for building a mobile testing architecture.

What’s new in HP LoadRunner

Session ID: TB2777
Speakers: Shane Evans (HP), Silvia Siqueira (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Tuesday 2:45 PM

HP LoadRunner continues to be the market-leading solution for load testing. In this session, the HP product team will present all the new capabilities and features of the latest release. Prepare to be impressed by the exciting news around the latest release! And you might also want to attend Session TB2675 for a similar insight into HP Performance Center updates.

[attachment url=”https://www.myloadtest.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-resources/hp-discover-2012-tb2777-sigueira.pdf”]TB2777: What’s new in HP LoadRunner[/attachment]

Service and network virtualization: recreating reality in the lab

Session ID: TB2304
Speakers: Todd DeCapua (Shunra), Mirek Novotny (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Tuesday 2:45 PM

IT environments today support hundreds of applications with dependencies on hundreds or more distributed services. This complexity—and the required integration of dependencies and application resources—is placing a burden on development and QA teams responsible for testing and validating application performance. In this session we’ll present capability overviews of both service virtualization and network virtualization, and we’ll share our vision of how these integrate and work together. We’ll also present a customer story detailing how the integrated technologies have been effectively leveraged to mitigate performance risks prior to deployment.

Wednesday (June 6th)

The host/MC for the Keynotes on Wednesday will be Kunal Nayyar, who plays Rajesh on The Big Bang Theory. This looks like an excellent day for a sleep-in.

Deliver relevant and actionable results for your performance testing projects

Session ID: BB1994
Speaker: Tony Nazarowski (JP Morgan Chase)
Session Type: Business Breakout
Time: Wednesday 11:15 AM

Not all performance testing teams deliver relevant and actionable results to their business customers. Often, the biggest barrier to success is not inadequate tools or lack of information–it’s communication. With a particular emphasis on system metrics, this session will set forth a practical approach to effectively collecting, organizing, and presenting performance test results to tell a compelling story that effects change and brings focus to the parts of your development process that need the most attention.

HP Service virtualization—a faster, better way

Session ID: TB2579
Speakers: Ajay Vaswani (Digital River), David Flynn (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Wednesday 1:30 PM

For many years developers have spent hundreds of hours writing thousands of lines of code, only to rip it out and throw it away once the application or service has been deployed. Or spent thousands of hours maintaining stubbing code with limited functionality. In this presentation, we’ll explain how HP Service Virtualization gives you a faster and better approach to the old stubbing practices, and we’ll share best practices learned at Digital River in managing the deployment of virtualized services to be used by developers, QA testers, performance engineers, and automation engineers. We’ll also share data-management strategies we use in the fast-paced world of global e-commerce services.

Ready for the challenges of testing mobile applications?

Session ID: BB2410
Speakers: Eran Yaniv (PerfectoMobile), Todd DeCapua (Shunra), Gal Tunik (HP), John Jeremiah (HP)
Session Type: Business Breakout
Time: Wednesday 1:30 PM

In order to stay competitive today, you need to make applications readily accessible to users—and more and more applications are being deployed on mobile platforms. While the front-end client and back-end technologies for mobile applications are constantly changing, the problem of producing quality applications remains the same—you still need to make sure that the application will function, perform to business requirements, and be secure once deployed. Join this lively panel discussion and hear HP, Perfecto Mobile, and Shunra share their insights and perspectives about what it takes to successfully test and deliver mobile applications.

Performance testing Roundtable Discussion

Session ID: RT3120
Speakers: Chuck Masters (Allegis Group), Shane Evans (HP)
Session Type: Roundtable
Time: Wednesday 2:45 PM

Chuck Masters from Alligis Group’s operations testing organization has more than 25 years experience in IT, spanning hardware and software and including performance testing. Join him for a discussion on current performance testing challenges. Topics will include performance testing of mobile applications, new protocols, centers of excellence, ways to test with few or no requirements, and how to decide whether or not to combine HP Application Lifecycle Management and Performance Center. We’ll also cover other issues performance testers are struggling with today.

Obviously, as this is a discussion, rather than a presentation, there will be no slides.

HP IT Performance Suite and the performance-testing lifecycle

Session ID: BB2007
Speakers: Chris Hurst (Comcast), Matthew Huddleson (Comcast)
Session Type: Business Breakout
Time: Wednesday 2:45 PM

Join us and become acquainted with the HP IT Performance Suite product suite, and the best practices it enables for performance testing. We’ll discuss processes such as requirements gathering, test-case creation, test monitoring, test execution, reporting, defect management, and closeout documentation.

[attachment url=”https://www.myloadtest.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-resources/hp-discover-2012-bb2007-hurst.pdf”]BB2007: HP IT Performance Suite and the performance-testing lifecycle[/attachment]

Performance engineering Web 2.0 applications in an agile world

Session ID: TB1977
Speaker: Mohit Verma (Tufts Health Plan)
Session Type:
Time: Wednesday 2:45 PM

Web 2.0 brings new complexity and challenges to traditional Web 1.0 performance engineering approaches. Join us in this session as we discuss a real-world agile performance-testing lifecycle for a mission-critical Web 2.0 application that we performance tested and tuned at Tufts Health Plan using HP Loadrunner. We’ll tell you when performance engineers should get involved in the project lifecycle, explain the technical architecture, and set forth the requirements for testing, the tools to use, and the value of pairing developers and test leads. We’ll also explain how our rapidly changing environment affected test scripts, and what the reporting requirements were, and we’ll tell you about tuning suggestions we made at the client and server level, what challenges we faced, and how we communicated efficiently to the project teams. You’ll come away with lessons learned that will help you deploy Web 2.0 applications more effectively.

No slides were made available for download for this presentation. It may have been cancelled at the last minute.

What’s new in HP Performance Center

Session ID: TB2675
Speaker: Priya Kothari (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Wednesday 4:00 PM

Join our product experts to find out about new features and functionality in the latest release of Performance Center. And you might also want to attend Session TB2777 for a similar insight into HP LoadRunner updates.

Performance testing from the cloud—at a price you can afford

Session ID: TB2320
Speaker: Tom Kleingarn (Digital River)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Wednesday 4:00 PM

Your test system met all performance requirements, but now your executive team wants external metrics on production hardware before go-live. You could spend tens of thousands of dollars to work with a third-party vendor for a few hours of external load tests, or run equivalent tests from the public cloud with the money you have in your budget right now. Or you could attend this session and learn how to save your company thousands of dollars as you respond to calls for high-capacity external load tests quickly and effectively. The presenter will cover the reasons cloud-based testing is attractive and the common challenges involved, and then move on to practical examples of implementing a cloud-based testing infrastructure on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform, with examples for the configuration of Windows and Linux virtual machines. The session will end with a demonstration of how extensible and cost effective a cloud testing infrastructure can be. You’ll come away knowing when external tests are applicable, and how you can avoid common pitfalls and confidently test from the cloud.

REI’s performance-testing journey

Session ID: TB2157
Speaker: Sreedharreddy Aerva (Recreational Equipment Incorporated)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Wednesday 5:15 PM

REI is a consumers’ cooperative that sells outdoor recreation gear, sporting goods, and clothing. Join REI presenters as they share the challenges they faced on their website in capturing AJAX calls, improving client-side rendering time, and providing information on performance defects—and tell you how they used HP Truclient technology in LoadRunner and HP Diagnostics to overcome them. This presentation will include how REI is leveraging HP LoadRunner for mobile testing.

No slides were made available for download for this presentation. It may have been cancelled at the last minute.

Performance and availability measurements of mobile apps

Session ID: TB2362
Speakers: Angelo Caso (Telecom Italia), Ngoc-Quynh Pham (Jamo Solutions)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Wednesday 5:15 PM

Telecom Italia applies high quality standards throughout the full life cycle of the delivered software platforms. During this presentation, the speaker will focus on the best practice and the gained experience in automating the performance and availability measurements of key customer related mobile apps deployed on Android and iOS devices. The environment is based on BSM from Hewlett Packard and M-eux test from Jamo Solutions. The performance measurement starts in the pre-release environment and continues during the release and operational usage of the mobile app. The aim is to ensure good performance and availability of the mobile apps that give access to the account of the Telecom Italia users. The presentation will highlight the different deployment phases of the monitoring solution; the effort associated with the deployment and gained results.

Thursday (June 7th)

The Thursday keynotes will be by Bill Veghte (Chief Strategy Officer for HP Software) and John Visentin (Executive Vice President, Enterprise Services), so there might be some hints dropped about new developments in HP Software. The Closing celebration will feature Sheryl Crow (country singer), and Don Henley (from The Eagles).

HP tools for software performance testing and analysis

Session ID: TB2552
Speakers: Justin Bruns (Fireman’s Fund Insurance), Robert May (Fireman’s Fund Insurance)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Thursday 10:00 AM

Join us and see how the FFIC Performance Engineering team utilized the combination of the HP Diagnostics, Sitescope, and Performance Center to diagnose and analyze performance bottlenecks in complex application architectures. The session will highlight the value added by integrating these tools into the performance testing and engineering lifecycle to go beyond response-time results and improve planning and decision-making. Using a case study, we’ll demonstrate how these tools helped us to gather information about the characteristics of several key architecture layers and components (Windows, AIX, J2EE, .NET, WebSphere MQ, IIS, JBoss, WebSphere, SQL Server, Oracle) and answer questions your questions about transaction speed, saturation or limitation of points in your architecture, and volumes that cause problems for your system and its components.

[attachment url=”https://www.myloadtest.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-resources/hp-discover-2012-tb2552-bruns.pdf”]TB2552: HP tools for software performance testing and analysis[/attachment]

Leveraging HP Performance Center

Session ID: BB2495
Speakers: Martin Spier (Expedia), Rex Black (J9 Technologies)
Session Type: Business Breakout
Time: Thursday 11:15 AM

In this case study, presenters from Expedia, Inc. will tell you how they achieved economies of scale via distributed performance testing throughout IT. You’ll hear how HP Performance Center enabled a shift from centralized, resource-constrained load testing to a system where appropriate performance tests can be conducted by any technology group. You’ll see how Expedia expanded performance testing to include unit-level performance, infrastructure tuning, benchmark testing, database performance, and integrated performance testing. And you’ll see how the company reduced the total cost of performance testing, increased the number of performance issues detected and the speed of detection, and cut the cost of defect resolution.

[attachment url=”https://www.myloadtest.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-resources/hp-discover-2012-bb2495-spier.pdf”]BB2495: Leveraging HP Performance Center[/attachment]

Martin has also written about HP Discover 2012 and posted his slides on his blog

HP LoadRunner: a demonstration of how much fun load testing can be

Session ID: TB2778
Speaker: Shane Evans (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Thursday 1:30 PM

In this session, the HP LoadRunner product team and R&D will demonstrate the new features of their product. Whether you’ve never seen LoadRunner in action or you’re an expert user, you’ll enjoy this demonstration, and learn a lot about the latest enhancements.

[attachment url=”https://www.myloadtest.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-resources/hp-discover-2012-tb2778-evans.pdf”]TB2778: HP LoadRunner: a demonstration of how much fun load testing can be[/attachment]

Reducing testing time and cost with HP Service Virtualization

Session ID: TB2582
Speaker: Mirek Novotny (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Thursday 1:30 PM

Application modernization and composite applications based on service-based software allow IT to decouple technologies and produce smaller units of functionality in agile increments. Re-use by smaller teams allows you to focus and to meet business requirements in small, incremental deliverables. However, companies embarking on SOA, cloud, and composite technology initiatives quickly realize that this approach has serious constraints because of interdependency among functional component constraints that can limit agility, increase costs, and jeopardize on-time delivery. Attend this session and see how service virtualization allows project teams to access limited or no-availability services and systems in a simulated, virtual environment. You’ll learn how your developers can quickly create functional mockups, reuse emulated services, or utilize local simulations of third-party services to dramatically speed up prototyping. And we’ll show you how your testers can eliminate wait cycles during test preparation and lower completion time for full end-to-end testing.

Extending VuGen 11.5 with custom add-ins

Session ID: TB2337
Speaker: Stuart Moncrieff (JDS Australia)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Thursday 2:45 PM

HP has redesigned the latest version of VuGen from the ground up with a new, flexible architecture. For the first time, users will be able to add their own features to VuGen with custom add-ins. Join this session and learn the best techniques for developing these add-ins, with a demonstration and dissection of the VuGen Script Validator developed by JDS Australia. Whether you would like to develop your own add-in, or just increase your productivity with add-ins developed by the other members of the LoadRunner community, this is a session you shouldn’t miss.

[attachment url=”https://www.myloadtest.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-resources/hp-discover-2012-tb2337-moncrieff.pdf”]TB2337: Extending VuGen 11.5 with Custom Add-ins[/attachment]

My slides are also available here.

Going mobile: Keys to the successful performance of your mobile application

Session ID: TB2412
Speakers: Sreedharreddy Aerva (Recreational Equipment Incorporated), Todd DeCapua (Shunra), John Jeremiah (HP)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Thursday 4:00 PM

Is your application mobile-ready? How will it perform when you release it into production? Will your users love it or hate it? Join this session to understand the challenges of deploying quality applications on mobile platforms. And learn about various solutions and approaches that will help you make sure that your application will perform as expected from day one.

Successful VuGen Scripting

Session ID: TB2498
Speaker: Megan Shelton (Nationwide Insurance)
Session Type: Technical Breakout
Time: Thursday 4:00 PM

Performance test results are only as valid as your scripts. Attend this session and learn how to create VuGen scripts that help you ensure success. We’ll tell you what to watch for when scripting and how to program scripts to capture different types of errors you may be missing.

[attachment url=”https://www.myloadtest.com/wp-content/uploads/migrated-resources/hp-discover-2012-tb2498-shelton.pdf”]TB2498: Successful VuGen Scripting[/attachment]

…I am planning on posting my slides here at the end of the conference. If anyone else wants their slides posted, I will include those too.