performancetestingobjectivesstrategy

Performance Testing Objectives, Building the Targets

Content Type: How-To:
Author: Scott
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Summary:

Experience shows that leaving performance testing until the last set of tasks prior to releasing the application to production is risky. It also shows that trying to validate or predict production performance too early is essentially pointless. This implies that early performance testing needs to be focused on something other than the prediction of production performance. This How-To addresses establishing objectives for performance testing and technical targets that contribute to, but are separate from, end-user goal and requirements.

Objectives:

* Learn how to establish valuable performance testing objectives at any point in the development lifecycle
* Learn how to communicate those objectives and the value they add to both team members and executives
* Learn how to establish technical, performance related targets (sometimes called performance budgets) that can be validated independently from end-user goals and requirements
* Learn how to communicate those targets and the value that testing against them provides to both team members and executives

Notes:

Performance testing objectives are also fairly easy to capture. The easiest way to capture performance testing objectives is simply to ask each and every member of the team what value you can add for him or her while you are performance testing. That value may be providing resource utilization data 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. While collecting performance testing objectives early in the project is a good habit to get into, so is periodically revisiting them and checking in with members of the team to see if there are any new objectives that they would like to see added.

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