So far the discussions about the nonfunctional specifications have been dormant during testing progress meetings. On the other hand, the development of the system components is still going on and these components have reached a stable state along with the automated test scripts. Consequently, at this point, the automation vision can be enlarged, and of course what follows is a meeting to discuss the action plans, such as:
- How are the developed components performing?
- Are there any improvement key points to be targeted?
- What are the hardware and network capacity requirements?
- What are the numbers around resource utilization?
Obviously, you were expecting to hear about performance testing. So where do you start and how do you execute this in Test Studio?
This chapter takes you through a step-by-step performance plan for a web application, and it demonstrates the following activities:
- Configuring Test Studio for performance testing
- Creating web application tests
- Assigning performance counters
- Running web tests in the performance mode
- Viewing and analyzing the test results
This chapter is a portal to the nonfunctional aspect of an application where it uses the Test Studio features for nonfunctional testing. In the general performance testing process, which is delimited by the successive activities of putting performance objectives, expectations, test execution, and results capturing and analysis, Test Studio automates the latter three activities.
So what are the variables that underlie this performance process and which of these do we want to address in this chapter?
For answering this question, let us first establish the criteria for a well-performing application. We are not seeking general principles in response to this question since it is highly bound to the application's contextual factors, such as the criticality of the operation carried out by the user, the potential financial loss, the amount of information that needs to be kept in the user memory until the next operation, and the operation type (whether it is two-sided, such as conversations) However, we could always say that a well-performing application is an application that offers timely, consistent, and efficient service to its clients. It provides user satisfaction and improves the users' productivity with respect to the manual services or processes they are seeking to automate. In addition, this application can maintain a level of competitiveness in the market, and will not cause its users to rush to the next competing application! For this reason, the expectation around application performance variables is not solely the decision of the product managers. It is a collaborative decision involving the product owners, company marketing department, and the clients.
Hence, back to our variables, despite the differences in the application types, the two terms mentioned earlier, timely and efficient, suggest the operation response time and resource utilization parameters respectively. The operation response time determines how fast the application is returning the operation results to the user whereas resource utilization determines how well the application is making use of the available hardware and software resources.
The next sections revolve around how to set up and go about performance testing in Test Studio to eventually extract response times and utilization for your web applications.