Hosted by Abstracta, WOPR29 is just around the corner

How was WOPR29’s theme chosen and why is it being hosted by Abstracta in Uruguay? Find out in this article, featuring Paul Holland, Andy Hohenner, Eric Proegler, and Federico Toledo. Many articles are coming up in this new saga called “Performance Testing In-Depth”, with interviews with great leaders and experts.

First company in Latin America to host WOPR (Workshops on Performance and Reliability)! 

In the past, it was hosted by giant companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, eBay, BlazeMeter, and so on. In different places in the US, Canada, and Europe. After 14 years of existence, it is our turn! It is really happening, and we are so proud!

The event is going to take place in Montevideo, Uruguay, on December 6-8, 2022.

WOPR is a crucial event to deepen the knowledge of performance testing with leaders in the field from around the world. It is a workshop for 20 to25 people where participants can discuss various topics. Such as the official website defines, “WOPR is a series of peer workshops for performance engineers & testers, operations planners, development managers, and related professionals.” 

Working practitioners share their experiences, which stimulate facilitated group discussions. Everyone takes part in the presentations, based on experience reports. They ask questions, give suggestions, and contribute to the debate. 

Founded in 2003, the event will mark its 29th edition this year. There is a different company hosting WOPR in a new city every year. The last one was held in Marseilles, France, in 2019. 

After that, we all know what happened when the pandemic hit. It is finally time to move forward, and it is a great honor to be the first WOPRs host since then. 

What is Abstracta’s motivation for hosting it? 

Federico Toledo, COO at Abstracta, said, “I remember when I started in performance testing, it was my first job in tech, in 2005. I remember reading about a conference where the most renowned people in the performance testing area get together to share their experiences and discuss and learn from each other; well, that was the WOPR….”  

He continued, “Now we have the honor to host the event and bring several thought leaders to get to know Uruguay and the local community. I strongly believe that in Latin America we have much to share. Part of our goals in hosting the conference is to bring the discussion closer, make it more accessible, and reduce the barrier for fellow Latin performance testers and SREs to participate in this type of event.” 

And he added: “Also, we want to show the expertise of our community to some of the most important thought leaders from the Northern hemisphere.”

Those are our motivations. And we had the honor of interviewing Paul Holland, Andy Hohenner, and Eric Proegler to learn more about their motivations for choosing us and what’s behind this year’s themes.

Why did you choose “Iterative Performance Testing” as the main theme of WOPR29?

Andy: As development cycles have gotten shorter and shorter, I’ve been exploring ways to do performance testing in the shorter cycles without losing the benefits or giving erroneous results. I chose the term to mirror Iterative Development and chose it as a theme because I’m not completely happy with the approaches I’ve figured out. They work but I’m hoping someone has found better approaches, or that we find a set of approaches that blend together to be better.

Paul: I was not involved in the theme creation. I reviewed the theme that Andy Hohenner created but I did not choose the theme. Now, that being said, it was a discovery at WOPR1 (yes 1! back in October 2003 in New York City) that many people experienced that the end goal of performance testing tended to be iterative. Those requirements for performance often started either vague or as a stretch target which was modified over the course of the project to better reflect reality.

Eric: I originally learned to load test pre-virtualization/cloud/container, at a time when releases were monolithic events with months of preparation. At late, or overdue, stages of projects, we’d reach a pace of iteration where yes, we were tuning and tweaking deployments, but the big improvements came from iterating in code. Despite high pressure, or perhaps because of the relaxation of constraints, some really great work happened. 

This made it easy for me to be enthusiastic about iterative development, which I think has impacted stakeholders’ willingness to invest in load testing even more than infrastructure as software or leaps forward in Observability. Now, many of us are releasing software 10/100/1000x more often, with far more powerful and rapid mitigations available. The economics are just not the same. Now load testing has to answer different questions to be relevant: Is this iteration better or worse than the last version?

Why did you choose Abstracta as the venue for WOPR29? Mainly, what have you seen at Abstracta and in Uruguay?

Paul: Because Uruguay seemed to be a nice place to visit. Because you offered to host (well, Federico offered) and we like and respect Federico.

Andy: Eric can speak to that more than I, he did the heavy lifting, mostly because Federico offered. Federico had some interesting stories at WOPR 28, I’m curious to find out more… Also, as Paul said, I’m interested in seeing Uruguay, not been to South America yet.

Eric: I first encountered Abstracta several years ago at a Web Perf meetup in San Diego, shortly before a CMG conference in the same city. The people I met were frighteningly competent, very curious, and serious about making a difference for their clients.

It feels like about five minutes after that when I next saw Abstracta, delivering at one of my biggest customers and asking us very incisive questions about our tooling. I was aware of them providing professional services for a competing vendor, and recruited them to do the same for us. They were contributing to JMeter, speaking everywhere, and establishing a reputation for really understanding the challenges around automated testing. 

As my relationships with specific people from Abstracta like Federico grew from there, I had the chance to explore a different relationship with them as consultants providing service to me as a quality leader trying to rapidly uplevel our automation practice. Unfortunately, my project lost its funding before we could get started on what was promising to be a lot of fun, but I was confident I had found the right partners to succeed. 

We’ve held WOPRs all over the world, but I was so excited when the opportunity to bring WOPR to Uruguay was presented. Federico’s passionate advocacy for Uruguay was not needed; I had talked with him about TestingUy previously and was enthusiastic about being in Montevideo. 

Interested in performance testing? Stay tuned! Many articles are coming up in this new saga called “PErformance Testing In-Depth”. We’ll be delving into various and diverse topics about Performance Testing, with interviews with great leaders and experts. 

Is there a specific topic you’re interested in having us talk about or would like to be interviewed on? Get in touch and let us know! 

Would you like to join the WOPR29? You can find out more details and apply here!

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