Chapter 9. Determining a Suitable Test Mix

Finally, we are in a position to give attention to one of the core matters surrounding testing and tuning: determining a suitable stress-test business process or other “input data” test mix. After all, it is the mix of activities, transactions, and processes executed under your guidance that ultimately simulates your financials' month-end close or helps you understand the load borne by your SAP customer-facing systems during the holidays or other seasonal peaks. And it's the test mix that brings together master data, transactional data, customer-specific data, and other input necessary to fuel a business process from beginning to end. You've certainly heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” It applies without question here, because poor test data will never allow you to achieve your testing and follow-on tuning goals.

Beyond SAP application-level data, though, input data can also consist of the scripts, batch files, configuration files, and so on required of lower level testing tools, like those associated with testing the performance of your disk subsystem, network infrastructure, and so on. As you know by now, sound testing of your SAP Technology Stack encompasses much more than strictly business process testing.

The goal of this chapter is therefore to help walk you through the challenges surrounding data: how to select appropriate data, what to look for, and what to avoid. In this way, you'll be that much closer to conducting stress-test runs that not only “work”but also truly simulate the load planned for your production environment.