Roadmap: How to adopt the Performance Testing practice |
This roadmap describes how to adopt the Performance Testing practice.
Main Description
Most reasonably sized IT organizations must establish a performance testing capability as one of their standard functions. Taken as an organizational function, we discuss the constituent parts of building this capability. Beyond the obvious organizational elements of budget and staff, you need SWEAT: Steps, Workload, Equipment, Analysis, and Tools. Steps refers to the need to follow a standard performance testing process. By obeying all of the important stages in this process, you can be assured of a reliable conclusion from your performance test. Workload refers to the user scenarios modeled, rates of execution, and the identified measurements used in the performance test. Some performance tests can yield significant results and system improvement by just running a stress test without an attempt to model the anticipated production workload on the system. In other cases, where you are trying to ensure that the system can handle its intended workload, perform the business analysis or distill it statistically from the current production system if possible. Equipment refers to the laboratory environment necessary to implement a full-scale performance test. Often, the system under test is undersized or the hardware required to drive the test is not anticipated. Analysis refers to the need to assemble a multidisciplinary team, including the system and application architects to participate in performance testing. They are instrumental in the tuning and subsystem capacity testing, as well as during the final full-scale testing process. Without their input, the system tuning would have to be done superficially without the intimate architectural knowledge of possible optimization,s and it is less likely to result in an acceptable final result. Tools refers to the adoption of highly scalable and productive testing and analysis tools that work with the latest generation of enterprise servers and their middleware. Today's toolset should include flexible and dynamic load generation, response time measurement, operating system monitoring, and distributed application analysis capabilities. Without these functions, today's highly complex enterprise applications can be difficult to analyze and tune. Successful performance testing requires a long-term commitment by the organization. Any enterprise that runs its business on a software-rich infrastructure cannot only survive, but adapt and thrive by evolving its infrastructure as business conditions change. Having a capability of repeatedly performance testing new versions of the software infrastructure is like an insurance policy against introduction of poor-quality software modifications. This information technology infrastructure is a strategic asset to businesses competing in today's global economy.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 1987, 2009. All Rights Reserved.