Book Review – The Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects

In this blog post, we are going to see about the book entitled The Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects – A Fun, Step-by-Step Walk-Through Guide by Leandro Melendez. Technical books focusing on performance testing and engineering targeting the performance testers as an audience are rare to find.

In the past, I read about The Art of Application Performance Testing by Ian Molyneaux and also its second edition. After a long think time, I was excited about this book release since the announcement.

About The Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects

If you are just getting started as a performance tester or 10 years into performance or 20+ years into performance testing and engineering, or DevOps, SRE or even CEO, never mind, this book is for everyone.

Here is the meme which I created. Whether you are in day 1 or 10 years into performance, the query you search for, never changes.

This book will give insights about the phases of the performance testing lifecycle in depth, starting from requirements to project delivery and beyond.

This book will teach you, how you hold the baby’s hand to teach walking or like installing the training wheel of bicycle to learn bicycling.

Why should you read this book?

As I foretold, this book is for everyone. The main reason why you should read this book is, this book is not technical oriented. You do not see any C or JavaScript code, or how to do correlation in JMeter, or how to insert think time etc. Instead, Leandro talks about various analogies to explain performance test concepts that anybody can understand.

He talks about games, movies, wedding plans, concerts, doctors, scientists, prophecies, dinosaurs, phones, and more.

Before explaining something technical aspect, he sets the background. If you are an experienced performance tester/engineer, just by reading the first block, you can guess what technical term he is going to explain in the Official Mumbo Jumbo (a flower bouquet to Leandro for this term :) ) section.

This book is divided into five levels, starting with Tutorials and Introductions to Solve the Crime!.

Within each level, you can find multiple sections depending on which level you are in (just like in video games).

Level 1 talks about all the questions: Why? What? How? Who? When? How much? and Where?

Level 2 is all about planning and strategizing the performance tests by creating documents, reviewing, and sign-off from the stakeholders.

Level 3 is about how to create tests, scenarios and configurations and more.

Level 4 explains about testing the waters, test execution, monitoring and repeating.

Level 5 is all about analyzing, reporting, presenting, and aftermath.

There are bonus sections which talk about revisiting the tests, agile methodology and more.

Once you start reading this book, I recommend not skipping any section. You may feel like, reading only the Official Mumbo Jumbo section, but do not do that. Just for future reference, you can only read the Official Mumbo Jumbo section to get better clarity. I recommend reading all the sections for the first time.

The one thing I expected from this book before the release was: performance testing and engineering in agile methodology and observability. I hope Leandro will start working on the second edition soon.

How to buy this book?

I have a Kindle Unlimited membership, It is free to borrow. But if you would like to purchase, you can either buy it on a Kindle or a paperback.

On Amazon, you can purchase the Kindle version for $9.99 USD, and a paperback copy is available for $14.99 w/ free shipping for Prime members.

The total number of pages is 269, which took me about 4-5 hrs to complete.

Conclusion

The Hitchhiking Guide To Load Testing Projects – A Fun, Step-by-Step Walk-Through Guide by Leandro Melendez is a must-read for performance testers/engineers irrespective of how many years of experience you have in this field. The core concepts are well explained by Leandro with analogies.

Writing a book is no easy task, Leandro did a great job by bringing all the performance concepts in an orderly fashion. After reading this book, you can easily navigate through the performance projects.

I hope Leandro will cover more Agile and Observability analogies in his next book.

This book is like The Phoenix Project for Performance Testers/Engineers.

PS: If you have not read The Phoenix Project, please read it immediately.