Putting together the final report of your performance test project is very important to the long term value of the
performance test project. Recording each of the experiments, summarizing the test results, the analysis, the corrective
actions taken, and the post-tuning test results is crucial to growing the experience and expertise of the performance
testing capability of your organization. Maintaining a lab log that contains all of the system and software changes
introduced into the system during the entire project and the sequence of experiments can be beneficial from a change
control perspective and also in a complete understanding of the final state of the system that corresponds to the final
run for the record set of results.
The report should also detail out the complete system configuration including operating system tunables, disk volume
layouts, size and characterization of the test database, network topology with firewall details, load balancers, and
complete specifications of the hardware and software versions present on each of the systems. Application versions are
critical to later understanding the use of these results as a baseline for future measurements or capacity estimates
based on these test results. Performance Tester reports can all be exported to HTML which can then be directly cut and
pasted into a final report. This makes getting the raw results and operating system resource data into the final report
a very efficient operation.
Probably the most important part of the final report is the enumeration of the testing goals with the associated
success criteria as compared with the final test results. Stating clearly whether the system has passed the test goals
should be explicit and summarized. Putting these project findings in an executive summary at the beginning of the
report is recommended with the justification coming from the main body of the report. The final two sections describe
the conclusions reached by the project and recommendations for future work.
As with any significant project, you should hold a post-mortem discussion with the project team members and gather both
the good practices to continue and the troubling one that have to be adjusted for a better experience next time. This
should not be part of the final report as it is an organizational and process asset rather than pertaining to the
project content.
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