Performance Testing Core Activity: Design -- PerfTestPlus

Core Performance Testing Principle:

Design

Overview

Planning and designing performance tests involves identifying key usage scenarios, determining appropriate user variances, identifying and generating test data, and specifying the metrics to be collected. Ultimately, these items will provide the foundation for workloads and workload profiles.

When designing and planning tests, your intent should be to create real-world simulations tests to provide reliable data that will enable informed business decisions. Real world test designs will significantly increase the reliability and usefulness of results data.

Usage Scenarios

Key user scenarios for the application typically surface during the process of identifying the desired performance characteristics of the application. If this is not the case for your test project, you will need to explicitly determine the usage scenarios that are the most valuable to script. Consider the following when identifying key usage scenarios:

Contractually Obligated Usage Scenario(s)
Usage Scenarios Implied or Mandated by Performance Testing Goals and Objectives.
Most Common Usage Scenario(s)
Business-Critical Usage Scenario(s)
Performance-Intensive Usage Scenario(s)
Usage Scenarios of Technical Concern
Usage Scenarios of Stakeholder Concern
High-Visibility Usage Scenarios

Metrics

When identified, captured, and reported correctly, metrics provide information about how your application’s performance compares to your desired performance characteristics. In addition, metrics can help you identify problem areas and bottlenecks within your application.

It is useful to identify the metrics that related to the performance acceptance criteria during test design so that the method of collecting those metrics can be integrated into the tests when implementing the test design. When identifying metrics, use either specific desired characteristics or indicators that are directly or indirectly related to those characteristics