Scott Barber

Chief Technologist, President and CEO

Professional Summary:

Scott Barber is viewed by many as the world’s most prominent thought-leader in the area of software system performance testing and as a respected leader in the advancement of the understanding and practice of testing software systems in general. Scott earned his reputation by, among other things, contributing to three books (co-author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, Microsoft Press; 2007, contributing author Beautiful Testing, O’Reilly Media; 2009, contributing author How to Reduce the Cost of Testing, Taylor & Francis; TBP Summer, 2011), composing over 100 articles and papers, delivering keynote addresses on five continents, serving the testing community for four years as the Executive Director of the Association for Software Testing, and co-founding the Workshop on Performance and Reliability.

Today, Scott is applying and enhancing his thoughts on delivering world-class system performance in complex business and technical environments with a variety of clients and is actively building the foundation for his next project: driving the integration of testing commercial software systems with the core objectives of the businesses funding that testing.

When he’s not “being a geek”, as he says, Scott enjoys spending time with his partner Dawn, and his sons Nicholas and Taylor at home in central Florida and in other interesting places that his accumulated frequent flier miles enable them to explore.

Publications:

• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability - Microsoft patterns & practices, Contributed content, reviewed & wrote forward

• Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications - Microsoft patterns & practices, J.D. Meier, Scott Barber, Carlos Farre, Prashant Bansode

• SearchSoftwareQuality.com

  • “Peak Performance” – Monthly Column, February 2007 - Current

• Software Test and Performance Magazine

  • “Peak Performance” – Monthly Column, June 2005 - December 2006

  • “Diagnosing Symptoms of Poor Performance” – July 2005

  • “Performance Tuning: Detecting and Eliminating Bottlenecks” – May 2005

• Better Software Magazine

  • “Investigate Performance Early, Validate Performance Last” – Jan/Feb. 2006

  • “High-Performance Testing” – May/June 2005

• IBM Developerworks

  • “User Community Modeling Language (UCML™) for Performance Test Workloads”

  • “Beyond Performance Testing” – 14 part article series extending traditional performance testing

  • “User Experience, not Metrics” – 13 part article series about commonly misunderstood performance testing topics

  • “Automated Testing for Embedded Devices” – describes automated functional and performance testing of embedded devices

Presentations:

• EuroSTAR Keynote - "Introducing the Captain of your Special Teams... The Performance Test Lead" (Slides|Paper), 2006

• Google Tech Talk - "Visual Application Usage Modeling", 2006

• BCS SIGiST – “Performance Testing for Managers”, 2005

• Software Test and Performance Conference (multiple), 2004-5

• 3rd World Consortium on Software Quality by iSQI (multiple), 2005

• Florida Institute of Technology – “Performance Testing Pitfalls”, 2005

• Web Site Evolution by IEEE – “Creating Performance Models Without Empirical Data”, 2004

• Software Test And Review (multiple), 2004-6

• IBM/Rational User’s Conference (multiple), 2002-4

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology – “Automated Testing of Embedded Devices”, 2004

Endorsements:

• “Scott Barber is one of the very few real experts and practitioners in performance testing and analysis.  He combines experience and passion for the problems of performance with a very scientific approach that takes into account complex, but critical, performance affecting variables that are conveniently ignored by most practitioners (making their performance results about as reliable as horoscopes).  Scott’s body of work, publications, and presentations clearly demonstrate that he has done his homework, knows his stuff, and his results are going to give you uniquely clear and realistic insights and solutions for your performance needs.” – Alberto Savoia, Founder and CTO of Agitar (Former Executive of Google)

• Scott combines technical knowledge, wisdom, high standards and good humor. I have full confidence in his services. – Cem Kaner, Ph.D., J.D., Professor of Software Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology and Director of Florida Tech's Center for Software Testing Education & Research, Senior Author of Bad Software, Testing Computer Software and Lessons Learned in Software Testing.

Honors, Affiliations and Certifications:

• MCSE Certified on Windows NT 4.0, A+ Computer Maintenance and Repair Certified

• Rational Certified Performance Testing Consultant, TeamTest Consultant, Rational Unified Process Consultant

• Association for Software Testing, ACM, Context-Driven School of Software Testing, Agile Manifesto Signatory, IEEE, American MENSA

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