I’m sure I am not the only one that brings my career experience into my daily non-work life. So, when I attempted to send several text messages to friends and family members shortly after midnight this past New Year’s Eve (12/31/2007), I was not surprised to encounter messages on my cell phone stating System Busy or Failed to Send Message. It seems that many of us in the larger metropolitan areas had the same idea at the same time and there was just not enough capacity to handle the volume of calls and text messages. So, it was at this point in the evening, over a glass of tasty sparkling white wine, and after wishing good tidings with my newlywed wife, that I had some thoughts pertaining to the technologies and challenges that I will probably encounter within the upcoming year, similar to a press release  that RTTS distributed discussing similar concepts.

Here were some of my thoughts before resuming my social engagements for the evening:

• RIA Rises - Rich Internet Applications using Web 2.0 technologies will probably make performance and scalability testing more challenging due to the dispersion of physical and logical data sources, the complexities that are now being pushed onto the web clients and the quick paced evolution of communication protocols, including SOAP, REST, JSON, and XML-RPC, amongst others. I don’t think that the Click-N-Test Methodology is going to be very effective in this arena.
• Enter the Enterprise - Lately I’ve been seeing corporations creating Intranets that go way beyond the role of providing static documents. Intranets are starting to be integrated into the role of the business, providing process workflow, enabling access to corporate applications, establishing social networks, and facilitating collaboration via Wikis. If providing this functionality to a business with hundreds or thousands of employees, performance becomes a critical factor in determining the success of the application, the productivity of employees, and in some cases corporate morale. Again, applying the principles of Performance-Testing-In-30-Minutes-Or-Less will not work to one's advantage.
• Meet the Mainframe - No, I don’t think that Mainframe systems are on the rise again.  However, with the momentum of server virtualization picking up, the Mainframe paradigm is taking hold again. Server consolidation will mean that great care needs to be taken when establishing application capacity and assigning system resources to components that are going to share a physical platform.

So, if I had to sum up my thoughts, I would say that performance testing will become even more critical as business and technology continue to merge, and automated performance testing will become even more challenging as result of the increasing complexity of this generation of applications.

What are your thoughts pertaining to these technologies and challenges?  Which other ones do you expect to encounter within the upcoming year?