Chapter 9 – Determining Performance Testing Objectives Objectives • • • •
Learn how to identify and capture performance-testing objectives. Learn how to capture or estimate resource usage targets and thresholds. Learn how to capture or estimate resource budgets or allocations. Learn how to review and update various types of performance-testing objectives and communicate the updates to the team throughout the project as more information becomes available.
Overview The key to determining the objectives of a performance-testing effort is to identify change, potential risks, and opportunities for improvement. One way to determine and record performance-testing objectives is simply to ask each member of the project team what value you can add or risk you can mitigate for him or her while you are conducting performance testing at a particular point in the project, or immediately following the accomplishment of a particular milestone. Such objectives might include providing data on resource utilization under load, generating specific loads to assist with tuning an application server, or providing a report of the number of objects requested by each Web page. Although it is most valuable to start collecting performance-testing objectives early in the project life cycle, it is also important to periodically revisit these objectives and ask team members if they would like to see any new objectives added. Keep in mind the following high-level considerations when determining performancetesting objectives: • Performance-testing objectives represent the starting point of performance validation and verification activities. • Performance-testing objectives start with the business entry points: business volume, future growth, and so on. With this information, you can articulate technological objectives mapping to the entry points. • Performance-testing objectives correlate to business needs and therefore should represent real-world business scenarios involving real customers. • After you have determined the high-level objectives, you can refine the objectives to map more specifically to the technology.
How to Use This Chapter Use this chapter to understand how to establish performance-testing objectives in a collaborative manner in order to provide the greatest value to the team. To get the most from this chapter: