Task: Establish Performance Test Goals
This task describes how to plan performance tests.
Disciplines: Test
Purpose

The purpose of this task is the following:

  • Developing performance test plans.
  • Characterizing the workload.
  • Identifying important performance measurements.
Relationships
Steps
Plan Performance Test
Identify performance testing targets, scope, and objectives. Begin to characterize the workload definition and capture workload definition decisions in the workload definition specification.
Identify Measurements
Select certain responses to specifically measure. By choosing highly visible or common activities in user scenarios, your measurements will represent a quantitative value of how well the end user will feel that the system is responding.
Develop Performance Test Plan
Capture performance test targets, scope, and objectives in the performance test plan.  Ensure that the test team understands the performance test goals by having the team review the performance test plan.
Determine Performance Test Success Criteria
Success criteria for your performance test are subjective and consist of a highly tailored set of pass/fail value judgments.  To facilitate effective performance testing, develop an agreement (for example, a service level agreement or SLA) for each important operation identified in your list of measurements.  Ensure that this agreement represents the operational parameters of the deployed system.  In most cases, agreement should be met by the pre-deployment performance test or they should be renegotiated.
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