May | 2010 | Catalin Anastasoaie

If you have ever asked yourself how to easily monitor the resources your application is using at any given moment or find out how many resources did it used over a long period of time in order to make an evaluation on how well does it performs and you are on a Windows machine that this post can help you.

The following page How to create a log using System Monitor in Windows from the Microsoft Support center explains stept-by-step how to create a monitor that can help you discover performance issues with your application (e.g. memory leaks).

I have used this to see how well does my application performs when run for a very long period of time with a large set of data and also to compare results between different versions of the application.

The ability to choose the format of the log file between binary, csv or sql database helps you in creating nice graphics in excel that can later help you present your findings more easily to others.

Yesterday, as I was scanning the internet for interesting stuff to read about I discovered the following video that convinced me that I really need to start trying out pair testing. The video shows 2 people playing a song at the time in pair on a guitar and not only that they managed to avoid each others fingers but they end up doing a pretty good job.

Until now I’ve only read or listened about the concept of pair testing and the benefits that could come out from it from different people but didn’t had the chance to try it out. The reasons why I didn’t try it out yet are found in any article, book or blog post that talks about pair testing – each time we thought about trying it there were the neverending “buts” that kept us from doing it: “but we are in the ending game”, “but we have to finish the certification”, “but etc”.

Now, after sawing this video I decided that I must take action and put “Try pairing w/ a colleague to test a feature” on my TODO list for the following week. All I have to do now is to search for some guidelines and then go and put them in practice.

I will come back with a another post about the learnings.

PS: This was my first blog post

Yuppy! sharing my thoughts with the rest of world is a great step for me in improving myself as a tester.