Performance Testing : Analysis and Planning Workshop (CSTP Elective) or (CTM Elective)

This tutorial covers the Elective area of the Test Management Body of Knowledge (TMBOK) required for the Certified Test Manager (CTM) certification. This tutorial also covers the Elective area of the Certified Software Test Professional requirements.

Concepts

An intensive 1-day course that provides strategies and methods for understanding, planning and implementing performance testing. Performance Testing requires 90% analysis effort and 10% tools. This one-day tutorial will be a case study of Performance Testing for an eBusiness application. The case study will involve analyzing the hardware platform, understanding the operational profiles and examining the actual test results.

Outline

Introduction and Terminology
- Understanding Time, Response Time, Throughput, Roundtrip time
- Understanding Bottlenecks
- Overview of Queuing Theory
- Understanding Virtual Users
- Why Performance, Load and Stress Testing are not the same
Overview of Hardware Architecture
- Recognizing and Understanding All of the Pieces
- Size Matters, but Bigger is not always Better
- Determining Physical Limitations in Hardware
Understanding the Performance Testing Objectives
- Finding Existing Bottlenecks
- Determining Current System Capacity and Scalability
- Verifying Real (or imaginary) Performance Requirements
- Verifying Impact of New Features
Defining the Metrics
- What are you Measuring and Why
- Measuring Too Much May Skew the Results
- Defining your Benchmarks
- Comparing Benchmarks - making sure you compare apples to apples
Analyzing the System and Building Operational Profiles
- Examine the System to Determine Operation Profiles
- Examine the System to Determine the Important Transactions for Performance
- Paths, Potentials and Probabilities
- Using Tools to Verify Your Profiles
Test Tools and the Environment
- Believing in the Results from the Tool
- Test Environment vs. Production Environment
- Test Logistics
Analyzing the Results
- Bad Scripts = Bad Results
- Condensing the Copious Data into Something Manageable
- How to Report the Results to various audiences
Performance Testing is Not Performance Tuning - You'll need support
- Hardware Support
- Development Support
- Network Support
- Web Host Support
- Application Expertise