Nicole van der Hoeven: “A good tester truly understands the culture of the application”

If we want to bring testers and developers together, what better way than through performance testing and performance engineering?

Nicole van der Hoeven, the guest of this episode, is a Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs. She’s been in the performance engineering space for more than a decade, most of that time as a consultant, helping teams test distributed systems and make them more reliable. 

Nicole believes that good testers truly understand the culture of the application, the company, and the people they are working with.

She explains that different tools use different terminology - JMeter has threads, K6 uses virtual users, and others refers to scenarios or populations - but the core concepts remain the same. 

Every tool provides ways to introduce delays (such as think time, pacing, pauses, or sleep functions) and follows similar principles. Understanding these fundamentals allows testers to adapt to any performance testing tool.

Don’t miss the discussion with Nicole.

Our host, Alex Mocioi, is a seasoned professional with 20 years of experience in software engineering and a decade in tech training. 

The Shift Happens podcast is supported this season by Mindera Romania, a leader in software development.