Presenting Performance Test Results:

How to present your results so that they are understood and are believable ??

How clearly and convincingly you present your results determines how successful you are. If doing performance work is a book on learning to fly, this?phase of Performance Testing would be called “Landing.”?“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Look at your results and conclusions and ask yourself how your audience will react.?The more disruptive, shocking, or expensive your conclusions and recommendations are, the more backup data you need and the more effort you want to expend in making an airtight case. However, just because you have 30 backup slides for your shocking revelation, doesn’t mean you need to show them all. Pay attention to your audience.

Build Your Faith In Your Results First:

Your results and conclusions may, or may not, be correct. Mistakes happen. Things are missed. Calculations are botched. Data can be corrupted. You are usually keenly aware of all of these things just before you have to present your results. Worry creeps into your mind like a cold fog, and you can find yourself unsure you know anything at all. There is only one way to prevent this. Start by accepting the fact that you are a regular, carbon-based life form fully capable of screwing up, and then do the hard work necessary to build a rock-solid faith in your results and conclusions. If you don’t?deeply trust in the results, then that lack of trust will show on your face, and whatever you say won’t matter. If they don’t believe you, your results are?worthless. This is especially true high up the org chart as they don’t have time to comb through all your data.?

Check Everything.??

Check it twice. Look for inconsistencies. If you use a tool to boil down your performance data, recheck a few values to be sure the tool is working. Present your results to a trusted co-worker to debug your analysis. Have someone else look for typos, misspelled words, and grammar glitches. Ninety-nine percent of this work will find nothing amiss, but the work is not wasted. You now have a rock-solid faith in your results, and your presentation has a few less booboos for your adversaries to use against you.?

Practice your Presentation:?

It is a natural human reaction to avoid difficult things, and that is why most people never practice their presentations before they give them. This is?unfortunate and leads to many overlong, boring, confusing, and generally bad presentations. You need to practice. Really. When you practice, say the words out loud, don’t just think them. You use a different part of your brain when you speak, and that gives you another chance to notice problems in your logic and in your material.??

No Bad Surprises:?

Never plan to surprise the person responsible for a problem in a public meeting. The goals of performance work are measured in response time and throughput, not in how much drama you create in the conference room when you point your accusing finger at the unsuspecting culprit. When you locate a problem, the first person you should find is the person who is responsible for that part of the computing world, and discuss that problem with concerned. Why? That person may know a lot more about that part of your computing world than you do, and may have further insights as to the root cause and the reason(s) why things are done this way. Often, I find that when I privately share my concerns and ask for help in crafting a list of possible solutions, that person is quite willing to be helpful.?General mistake of not involving the person believed was responsible for the problem would suffer below consequences, usually in this exact order:?

1. The person responsible for that part of the computing world gets angry and defensive and works relentlessly to tear down your work and credibility.?

2. That person points out ignorance and further points out the real problem is caused by some other part of the computing world owned by a different person. Now there are two angry people in the room.?

3. Now the manager becomes angry with you for creating tension among the team. It always works better when we talk to the responsible person privately well before writing up recommendations. We look at the problem and explore solutions. Then we can walk into the meeting and say something like: “The problem is here, and after working with X team, we have a few ideas on how to improve the situation.”?

To Tell The Truth:?

If you are presenting your findings and you don’t know something, admit it directly and, if it’s important, add it to your to-do list and move on. Don’t try to hide your ignorance. The decision makers need to have confidence in you. A big part of that confidence is setting a clear line between what you know and what you don’t know. When pressured by others to hide an inconvenient truth, you can emphasise other things, and you can even leave the inconvenient truth out of your presentation, but do not lie.?

Leave The Judgments To Others:?

When you present, you are not a superhero striking down evil. You are not an arbiter of good design. You are not there to make yourself look big by making others feel small. You are a member of the team, dispassionately presenting well-checked information and potential solutions for problems. Stick to the facts, and leave the judgments to others.? I have seen presentations where the speaker delivered the bad news in a mocking and sometimes directly insulting way that hurt group cohesion and deeply offended people in front of their peers. That approach did not aid in answering the question, but it did unleash a wave of back-stabbing and other bad behavior. Every time I have seen someone be intentionally cruel or hurtful to a co-worker, it has not worked out well for them, especially in the long run.?

When The Tension Is High:?

Sometimes the success or failure of your group hangs on your results. When the stakes are high, and everyone is hoping for good news, while preparing that?presentation you might want to start your talk with something like this:? With the current configuration, we will not be able to handle the upcoming peak. However, I’ve identified the bottlenecks and I have workarounds to propose for all of them. Let me show you what I’ve found.? I have seen presentations, without this early calming statement, go badly. When the presenter was about half way through the list of all the serious problems ahead some participant will start angrily demanding something like: “Are we screwed?!?”, “Is there a fix?!?”? End of the day, this is not what you want.

Happy Presentations !!!

Credits: Great, unknown, experienced performance engineer :)