HP Universe

Wednesday - June 18, 2008

6:30 a.m. -  Tim and I hit a local place off the strip that all the cabbies know to go for breakfast called "Ellis Island". 

It was cheaper to take a cab ride down to the place and eat than to eat at the hotel. $4.99 for two pancakes, bacon, two eggs any way you want. Notice how early in the day I start talking about food. You gotta start with a good meal to last all day at this conference. Of course, I still went down to the HP breakfast and caught couple of photos for those of you who are not here. 

08:00 a.m. - David Gee kicked us off today with his version of a scene in 21 where his face was superimposed over Kevin Spacey's in the film. Pretty funny. 

Ben Horowitz came up to talk about the HP Software Products. Due to the many people hung over from last night, he said all of his presentation would be done in pictures. 

Jonathan Rende (HP VP of Products) came up to talk in more detail about the products and the application lifecycle management. Within the new requirements module of Quality Center, there has been a lot of work done to integrate it with the Project and Portfolio Management. Out of the box they have created project template that can be used in Agile and Waterfall test methods. Jonathan said that HP is now considered number one in requirements management. 

He talked about LoadRunner and Performance Center. Some of the new things are Web 2.0 support and the Service Level Agreements and building them into test scenarios. SLA's can be shared between testing and operations through sharing the SLA's between Performance Center and Business Availability Center.

HP has also integrated the security center (from the SPI Dynamics aquisition) and Quality Center to bridge the gap between quality and security teams. The goal is to embed security testing into the quality lifecycle. 

Ramin Sayer came up to share about Business Availability Center and the new 7.5 release. Transaction visibility is now integrated into BAC from Bristol aquisition. Also new is problem triage for operations with an automated workflow to make troubleshooting proactive.  You can now drill directly in network node manager to see exactly where the network problem is, for example.

Ben Horowitz followed up with an announcement about the new federated configuration management system, and claims HP is the first to truly automate this based on ITIL version 3.0 standards. An additional announcement is around virtualization management, but I did not really catch what the announcement was. I do know HP servers will support VMWARE, Citrix, Xen, and Microsoft virtual technologies.

Christopher Rence (CEO for Fair Isaac) spoke about how they have used the HP products to help them achieve and agressive 24-month roadmap to integrate all of their applications gained through aquisitions, meet auditing and compliance standards, and implement things like SOA. Chris brought up a friend of mine, Michael Cooper, who told us how they have used Quality Center, Functional Testing, and LoadRunner to reduce testing cycles and cost for QA. If you get a chance to meet Michael, do so. He is a very sharp guy who knows his stuff, especially Quality Center.

Chris Rence and Michael Cooper

Caleb Sima (CEO for SPI Dynamics) spoke to us about who SPI Dynamics is, what they do, and demonstrated some techniques that hackers use. He dmonstrated how he hacked into HP and how SQl injection used. He showed us expense reports and salaries of some the HP leadership. Probably the coolest of the executives at HP at the conference. I enjoyed his session. Two things he advised all attendees about shopping online was:

1. Use one credit card with a specific limit to use for online purchases and only use that card. 
2. Use something like Credit Watch to see when things change so you can do effective disaster recovery if and when your card is stolen.

Finally, Jean-Michel Cousteau from the famous exploring family got up to speak about how things are really all connected together and the importance of conservatism.

All in all, a good set of mainstage presentations.

11:00 a.m. - First off, Howard Jessee spoke on how CHEP (with one of the fastest growing databases in the world with over 7 Terabytes) needed to better handle change control for all the SAP transports and reduce negative impact to all the rapid changes happening on their system. They used HP's Change Impact Testing to do this.

Howard Jessee

I made my way over to catch the last half of Sajid Inayat of JPMorganChase at the session titled "Performance Testing: From development to operations" explaining how they use key performance data from production to determine where bottlenecks are in their system and use this information to plan for capacity. They use BAC for end user experience metrics, but also created a home grown solution to present additional data that they need across all systems. To do capacity planning and modeling a test environment in comparison to production, they used Hyperformix to model out how big the environment should be and implemented their test environment as a "sized" environment based on that information. By "sized", I mean a fractional size of production. 

One of the hardest things to do in a large organization is to bridge the gap between development and performance testing, and then turn around and bridge the gap between performance tesitng and operations. It takes months and years of evangelism to do this, generally. 

12:00 p.m. - Spent about two hours on the floor of the partner showcase booths. We talked with Andrew Flick at Infragistics about their controls and some of the difficulties we have had testing them with Quicktest Pro. Andrew is the Product Manager for the Rich Client side of the company. He is an extremely nice guy and I think with their help, we can get a better solution for testing their objects with HP functional testing software. Infragistics makes a great product so you should stop by and see him. Look for the booth and then find the guy who looks about 16 years old. :)

Hung out with one of the "stars" of today's presentations on the mainstage, Michael Cooper.

Before we left the area, I finally saw Bill Selph (Merril-Lynch) who used to be with CorTechs. I haven't seen him since the last time I was in St. Petersburg at their Mercury User Group in about 2005, and it was really good to see him and hear how he is doing as part of the performance team there at ML.

02:00 p.m. - Time for the reason I am here. Attended the presentation "HP Performance
Center and LoadRunner: Updates and the road ahead". Many HP folks I have communicated with via e-mails I had the chance to meet in person, including the presenters (Mark Tomlinson, Stephen Felony). Erez Barak, the LoadRunner product manager was there as well.

LoadRunner 9.x stragic themes include:

1. Reducing the testing timeframes
2. Web 2.0 and "next generation" apps (web services, FLEX, AMF)
3.  Platform Extensibility (SDK)
4. Center of Excellence enhancements

Click & Script is definitely part of the longer vision for the product, but it is definitely a two-edged sword. While for some applications it makes things easier (when it works, it works really well), if you try to have less technical QA resources use LoadRunner you will eventually hit a wall. You will come across the need to go back to the "old school" way of finding lots of nasty correlations and writing C code. Those who look to automatic correlation to figure everything out for them will find it frustrating.

For Performance Center 9.1, the ability to copy scripts and monitoring profiles between projects is built into the product. The latest versions of SiteScope (up to 9.01) are supported for integration.

Mark Kachik from Sprint/Nextel spoke about their CoE and their move to Performance Center 9.1. He spoke about where they have come from since 2002 to present day, and where they want to go from here. Mark showed their progression in stages and had an illustration very similar to the HP maturity model for a CoEI am intimately familiar with, but his had been modified to fit their experience of implementing the Performance Center product. I'm not sure that his discussion points on their journey neccesarily nailed what the characteristics of the various stages really are. Even though they are in "stage 4" according to Mark, there was no indication they were a Performance Authority. But this was not really explained in depth, so they may be and I just don't know it.

Mark shared their experience in a Beta program for 9.1 and was very frank and honest about the good and the bad of the product in their view and their experience with HP. Overall, they are pleased with 9.1 and it was glad to hear that the product has been gone over by a client who uses it all the time and has positive things to say.

Stephen Feloney (HP Performance Center Production Manager) followed up to talk about what is coming in the next 8 to 24 months. 

1. Topology - attaching a topology diagram for the project.
2. Trending - being able to compare across multiple tests. Currently this is done by crossing two results files. This will be much simpler. Click on a few test results and click one button and you will see the results over many runs.
3. Auto Detection of Protocols - Point to the applications and let VUGEN automatically discover which protocol should be used
4. Network Emulation Testing - simulate users from different parts of the globe. In the past, this was handled with an add-in (WAN Emulation) with Shunra. Stephen confirmed HP is again working with Shunra to see what they can do to bring a new solution. I pressed him on this and he stated he WAS NOT announcing that this is an official announcement that Shunra WAN Emulation was coming back to the product, but they are in discussions about what to do and Shunra was one of the recommended partners.
5. CoE - Version Control, Project grouoing, Multi-Project Reporting, and Performance Defects to Requirements Traceability.

There will be a new integration between Quality Center and Performance Center so that performance defects can be stored and versioned in Quality Center. You will then be able to trace performance requirements back just like functional requirements.

There will be a guided workflow for planning in testing projects that includes a description, recommendations, and other information. You will be able to store your planning information with the project itself. We've been asking for something similar to this for years.  I am interested to see how this gets delivered within the product.

There will also be more effort in storing information that comes from production that helps in the performance/availability lifecycle.

(ABOVE) Stephen Feloney - as he is grilled about
why Remote Viewing was taken out of LoadRunner
several version ago and he wishes he was
in the bahamas sipping on some adult beverage

Stephen said they are working on creating additional data exporting features so you can combine that data with third party products, should you wish to do so.

I met Jeff Kingston (Disney - Sr. Programmer Analyst) who also spoke at the conference about their move from LoadRunner to Performance Center.

03:50 p.m. - Had to get my picture taken with the center of the HP universe party, Bill Hayden of Orasi Software.

Myself with a true party animal

04:00 p.m. - Attending the session "Test Centers of Excellence: Developing the right road map" by Kevin Sullivan and Andrew Bannon from BearingPoint. I've been talking about building CoE's around performance testing for enterprise level companies since 2003 going back into my Deloitte days, so I was very interested in hearing how BearingPoint approaches this. 

It is basically "Identify, Prioritize, and  Achieve"

1. Idenfity includes improving quality, reducing cost, decreasing time to market
2. Prioritize includes the "levers" of people, process, and technology
3. Outcome includes early results, widespread adoption

They talked about "Think Big, Start Small".  What they meant is to get early results for smaller wins and eventually get wide spread adoption. It involves getting executive-level sponsorship prior to designing and deploying the TCoE, identifying pilot projects to use proper process, tools, and artifacts, and starting with one line of business.

I asked them about how their strategy aligns with the HP maturity model for a CoE and they stated this is BearingPoints own process and designed to fit more than one product vendor solution.

05:00 p.m. - Back to the room to get changed and relax for just a few miuntes.

06:00 p.m. - Went to the Partner showcase tonight. I walked right down and forgot my camera. I did not realize I had a camera on my cell phone until just before I left, so I apologize for the lack of photos.

Shared a table with Roddy Naranjo at Perot Systems, from Florida.

I finally met Geraldine Manongdo at SKYIT Group, as she was handling the botth. Geraldine goes way back to the early Mercury days and we have talked by phone and e-mail in the past.

Caught up with John Grizzard at Solutions3 and his crew (Pete Conrad, Bob Kelly, and Elwood Lewis).

Saw Raul DeLeon and realized we have not had a chance to talk even though we have passed each other several times. He introduced us to Cheryl Pelligra, account manager at Technisource out of Dallas.  

If you look over the left shoulder of Raul, you will see a herd of Orasi people clustered together in some secret tribal ritual. Note the migration of "the Orasi" (plural for one Oras) back and forth to the beverage station periodically. Although the Orasi people are easily frightened, they'll soon be back, and in greater numbers. I did have the chance to introduce Tim to one of their members, Erik Pena. Erik looks a little like Charlie Sheen to me for some reason, but I hear the Orasi have morphing capabilities too, so.....

I couldn't leave without stopping by the Vivit booth, since I am now one of the chapter leaders for the new Nashville chapter. I had a chance to meet Rocky Pisto and Donna Forte for a few minutes. Vivit are made up of people who really care about the direction of HP software and this is the advocacy part of the job. Being involved is the only way to help bring about positive change and I believe that is what Vivit is trying to do, as well as bring together the HP software community. If you are not part of a Vivit chapter, well, you SHOULD be. Find out where your nearest one by checking out their web site at:

www.vivit-worldwide.org

09:00 p.m. - That's all for tonight. It's been non-stop since Sunday night and I have to admit, I am getting a little tired. I am going to turn in a little early. We'll fire it back up in the morning.