The Art of Application Performance Testing

Chapter 3. The Process of Performance Testing

I see plans within plans.

—from Dune by Frank Herbert

As discussed in Chapter 1, many performance testing projects come together as a last-minute exercise. I would happily wager that you have been involved in a project that falls into this category. In such cases, you are constrained by limited time frames and pressure to deploy by a certain date, even though the application may have serious undetected performance problems. This chapter describes a performance testing approach to follow so that any new projects you participate in don’t suffer from the same pitfalls.

In Chapter 2 my intention was to cover performance testing requirements in a logical but informal way. This chapter is about using these requirements to build a plan: a performance testing checklist divided into logical stages. We’ll also look at how this plan can be applied to a couple of case studies based on real projects. Each case study will demonstrate different aspects of the performance test process and will provide some of the examples used in Chapter 4 to demonstrate the interpretation of performance test results.

Each case study features a review of how closely (or not) the performance project aligned itself with the requirements discussed in Chapter 2 and the suggested approach provided in this chapter.

The Proof of Concept (POC)

Before looking at the performance testing process, I want to spend a few moments reiterating why a Proof of Concept (POC) is an important ...