Important Performance Test Activities:

Important Performance Test Activities:A) Identify the complete testing Environment:Find the testing environment before starting anything that includes Network, software and hardware configuration details at production environment and the environment which is available for testing team. This kind of study enables you to do more efficient and in depth testing challenges and there by finding the critical bottle necks.B) Identify the Performance production bench mark criteria.Find out the production bench mark criteria (also called SLA- service level agreement) i.e. desired response time, throughput and system measurements from the respected personnel (users, business users, system administrators at clients place). Some times as a performance engineer, it is your responsibility to suggest the users for better combinations of the results in order to built more efficient end user application. In a simple word you should be in a position to explain what configurations of the existing production system (network band width, data base configurations, application servers’ configuration, web server configurations, and load balancers etc).C) Planning and Designing of the Tests to be done.Planning and designing of test includes creating the more critical, common and unusual scenarios that may occur when the application reaches the end users.A scenario should be created thinking if you were the end user, what activities you will do most often while using the application. For a while assume that your application is www.bankofamerica.com. Consider scenario1, you wanted to transfer some money to your friend. For this scenario you may need to do more than one transaction to complete your goal. i.e first you will login the site with your user name and password (this will be one script), second, you will click on ‘transfer funds’ link and then add a new user(to whom you are going to transfer the money) to your recipients list(this will be second script), thirdly you will transfer the amount by giving your account details and your friends account details(this will be one more script). So, this whole thing of ‘transferring money’ is considered as one scenario. By now you might have understood that each scenario may consist of one or more scripts. You have to design such scenarios along with the proper documentation of what kind of system metrics / server metrics to be collected and consolidated so as to compare the with the Production benchmarks/SLAs.D) Creating / configuring the test environment.Testing environment has to be prepared before conducting the test. The test environment includes the tools, soft wares, hard wares and monitoring tools for resource measurement. A proper study is very important before creating the testing environment, otherwise some times if you run all the scenarios and gathered the results, you realized that the environment is not designed to match the production environment, it will consume more time, resources and money as it includes re testing of all the scenarios all together.E) Implementing the test design.This is nothing but developing the performance tests as required by the test design. This includes developing the scripts for all scenarios as described in the test designs. All the scripts have to be tested independently before executing the scenarios (which includes one or more scripts together).F) Executing tests in test design.Create the scenarios, collect the scripts which are required to create the scenarios into controller and load necessary load generators, add all the server details(IP addresses) i.e application servers, web servers, database servers to the monitoring resources. Once it is completed then schedule the scenario(time to run/start the scenario). Once the scenario is started running then observe the response times, throughputs, system resources of different servers to see if there are any abnormal behavior of the server. Once completed then collect the measurements, other performance data and analyze it and make a detailed report/suggestion note.G) Finally Analyzing reporting/suggestions of test results.Here collect all the results of above step(executing the test) and see individual results and cross functional results of different measures (response time, throughput, system resources, cpu usages etc) and take the ave times for combinations of these and compare all the results with the Production benchmark / SAL(service level agreement) data. If the analyzed results are with in the limits of production bench marks, then your scenarios is passed for those system requirements. If it does not meet the production bench mark results then you need to rerun the test with some changes and again do the whole process to compare with production bench mark data. Do this until it meets the SLA requirements. Many times you need to discuss with the development team, server administrators with the gathered results to find out the bottle necks and solve the problem