David Maillet, IT Director with American Tire Distributors (Huntersville, NC), seeks to provide as much automated, self-service capabilities to other teams as possible, freeing humans to focus on the really interesting and creative stuff. He is a technology professional focusing on software engineering and process improvement, largely within the B2C and B2B domains. David currently leads teams with three distinct focuses: performance engineering, QA automation, and DevOps practices.

David Maillet is presenting at the Performance Engineering in the Time of DevOps Conference on August 18th.

The Session:

A plan-driven (waterfall) approach to projects often relegates performance testing to the end of a project. This can lead to significant surprises, especially when we discover that slow performance requires some significant architectural changes, rework, additional regression testing, and more. All that affects the overall project delivery and often will delay an important release.
This session will share the story at American Tire Distributors, tracing how the team began a few years ago with traditional plan-driven (waterfall) approaches to performance testing, and over the last two years, have begun to be more agile, shifting some applications to performance test throughout the software development life cycle. Yet, performance engineering involves more than just load testing. An application quality attributes (such as performance) need to be defined in collaboration with Product Owners early in the life of a product.
This session will be tools-agnostic and report on our experience in performance engineering, performance testing, in both waterfall and agile efforts, and lessons we learned along the way. This will be a useful case study with specific and relevant examples for others.
The presentation will particularly benefit IT leaders, Performance Engineers, Development teams, and teams who contribute to DevOps practices.

About the Presenter

David Maillet, IT Director, DevOps, Performance & Quality Engineering, American Tire Distributors

David Maillet, IT Director with American Tire Distributors (Huntersville, NC), seeks to provide as much automated, self-service capabilities to other teams as possible, freeing humans to focus on the really interesting and creative stuff. He is a technology professional focusing on software engineering and process improvement, largely within the B2C and B2B domains. David currently leads teams with three distinct focuses: performance engineering, QA automation, and DevOps practices.

Presentation Date/Time: August 18, 10:10 AM EDT

General topic(s) covered: Experience at ATD; Performance Engineering; Approaches in Agile vs. Waterfall; CI/CD