CQE shares Black Friday Performance Testing experience with BCS members

CQE were delighted support members from The Chartered Institute for IT (BCS), sharing the real-life experiences of our Black Friday Performance Testing journey. The hybrid event took place on 26 January 2023 at Sheffield Hallam University, with Managing Director, Stuart Barker attending as the keynote speaker.

 

Stuart used a real-life example of CQE’s performance testing journey, in preparation for Black Friday. He told the story of a leading retailer, whose sales order system topped out at 70 orders a minute on a good day, and how panic set in when the business told them they needed to deal with random and intense spikes in demand. Stuart was tasked with answering the following questions:

 

  • Would the system just crash?

  • Would products be sold to people that were no longer available?

  • Could the fulfilment centres cope with those same demands?

  • Could we improve performance at all?

  • Would customers be left disappointed after they missed out on that essential item they didn’t really need?

 

The session aimed to provide BCS members with insight into:

  • what effective performance testing looks like

  • how technical testing can be a rewarding and valuable career choice

  • how testing saves money!

 

When asked about the value that the session brought, Rashik Parmar, Group CEO of BCS, said:

“The engaging presentation clearly demonstrated the importance of performance testing for project success.”

 

Setareh Jalali, Lecturer in Cyber Security at Sheffield Hallam University, said:

“The presentation was excellent. The audience all learnt a lot about the approach to performance engineering and testing.”

 

As Managing Director of CQE, Stuart Barker has spent 27 years specialising in software development, test delivery and quality assurance. He has helped banks, retail, and government (local and national) to implement new systems, improve quality, and resolve challenging technical problems. Stuart has been fortunate to work in the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as the UK, experiencing the cultures and working practices of these different countries and integrating the best parts of these into the way we do things at CQE.

 

The Chartered Institute for IT (BCS) has over 60,000 members in 150 countries, and a wider community of business leaders, educators, practitioners and policy-makers all committed to its mission. As a charity with a royal charter, BCS’ agenda is to lead the IT industry through its ethical challenges, to support the people who work in the industry, and to make IT good for society.