Guideline: Performance Test Report |
This guideline describes the main information which needs to be captured in a performance test report.
Relationships
Related Elements | Evaluate Performance Test Test Evaluation Summary
Main Description
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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