Are You Ready To Test For Performance?

 Alik Levin    This post is inspired by a post Load Testing 101 by Andreas Grabner. The dynatrace blog and the dynaTrace AJAX Edition free tool are both invaluable resources for anyone who cares about performance – and you should!

Quick Resource Box

In the post Andreas provides a list of reasons for “Why do Load Testing Projects fail?” and that is:

  • Application is not ready for testing.
  • No real life test use cases and test data.
  • Problems with the Load Testing Infrastructure.
  • Not enough data was captured during the load test.

I thought it’d be useful to compile quick checklist to help reduce the risk of being unprepared toward load testing effort. The checklist can be used by a PM [project manager] when estimating the efforts.

Application Readiness

  • Key test scenarios identified. Key scenarios are:
    • High usage rate. For example, search.
    • Highly technical. For example, heterogeneous tech, complex algorithms.
    • High visibility. For example, yearly revenue report for CEO.
  • Key scenarios functional bugs free. You do not want to measure response time of HTTP 404 or HTTP 500.
  • Application responds well for several users. Call it smoke test.
  • Application functionally tested in the environment where perf testing is going to be performed.

Real Life Test Use Cases and Test data

Load Testing Infrastructure Readiness

  • There is enough licenses to perform load testing.
  • Test automation technically capable to simulate use cases.
  • Test hardware is not a perf bottleneck.

Captured Data is Representative

Related Books