Moving forward with our „Meet the Speaker” series, we’d like to introduce Patrycja Markowska, a QA Specialist at Apptension.
In her session, you’ll learn about the RAIL model, some basic optimizations and how to verify them using freely-available tools such as Lighthouse Performance audit and Chrome DevTools.
We asked Patrycja a few questions related to her topic.
TestingCup: Is performance more people, software or hardware problem nowadays?
Patrycja: I would say… it depends. I don’t think we can benefit from this kind of generalisation. Many people are asking this question, but there really is no one answer to that. If I’m a part of a development team that provides software to the end user, it takes people and software to ensure the best performance, as we can’t control what kind of a device user will use. What’s more, we also can’t control what network conditions that user has. Providing software for any sort of commercial use, we may have a device matrix provided by the client, but this still doesn’t resolve variety of network conditions end users could have. Ideally we should write the code, test it in lab, release it and validate it via real user’s metrics. We should be aware that testing in lab doesn’t provide data that is reliable enough, partly because analytics tools have direct impact on performance, partly because we’re not able to simulate variety of users’ conditions. Anyone that would like to tackle to answer this question should see the whole picture, there’re often blockers on the business level that pre-holds us from optimization and performance improvement. My final answer is: performance is people, software, hardware, budget problem – it’s often a multiple choice answer.
TC: Describe performance in 3 words.
P: „Loading for ages”. This is how real users usually describe bad performance. From our point of view, performance is a complex topic and there’re many areas for improvement and for failure as well, but at a conceptual level, people just want pages or apps to load quickly and they want to have a seamless experience, free of lags and junks.
TC: How do you imagine the world in 100 years?
P: I don’t think my imagination goes that far. I’m pretty creative when it comes to software and how to break it though. But If I have to answer, I hope there’re still going to be green areas and nature and city landscape would be more balanced when it comes to concrete-grass ratio. People should learn to see beauty and value in nature, I hope 100 years will be enough to stop polluting and start preserving.
TC: Do you have any role models or individuals who inspire you?
P: Surprisingly, I don’t have any role models. In my daily work I work closely with the developers and I try to learn from them as much as possible. Every project I step in, I try to establish a comfortable relationship with developers, so I can benefit from them, and they can benefit from me. At the end we’re all responsible for the quality. It’s not entirely fair, as I encourage them to test and they do, while I still don’t code but I’m pretty sure they’re absolutely fine with that 🙂