Author: Chaitanya M Bhatt

Many people say that process oriented work is the key for success. Even I strongly support that statement but I always wonder why people do not give prominence to those 7 basic quintessential points of performance test activity which can truly make or break a project.

When a resource is allocated to a performance test project the first thing the project manager would ask him/her to do is to start working on preparation of a test plan. But during test plan preparation phase, it is very often seen that test managers and his/her subordinates would heedlessly prepare the document with most of the contents of the document copied from previous projects or from arbitrary template available in the internet and proceed to the next phase without giving any prominence to those requirements/specifications mentioned in the test plan. It is undeniably a known fact that preparation of a test plan is always done as a formality obligated to the company’s process standards (like ISO tick it) and as a consequence this document is never really used in conjunction with project execution.

Time to be invested for a test plan preparation I would say should be a significant part of the total project execution time. But all these facts are unfortunately talked more in theoretical sense and less in professional sense and hence practitioners often fail to strictly bind their activities as per test plan intimidated by the large overhead of process associated with it and also believe that it would slow them down.

This undoubtedly is a bad practice, but even if you negate the project planning phase – I feel we can still expect light in the end of the tunnel if the test engineers incorporates those 7 basic quintessential facets of performance test activity religiously during project execution phase.

The 7 tenets are:
1. Know what the SLA states.
2. Understand the real user usage patterns.
3. Know how to load the server.
4. Know how much to the load server.
5. Know what type of load needs to be induced on the AUT.
6. Know your test tool well to maximize on its capabilities.
7. Know your test environment.

The best part of these tenets is that you just have to make sure they are a part of your consciences in your professional frontier. You need not document these things neither would you have to present it to the client; you just have to practice it. Because in the end, what the client expects is not how good or bad was your load test plan nor would the client be bothered of those different standards that you followed, instead the client would always be more bothered about the degree of accuracy of the result that you have presented to them and how much of help would these statistics be to improve the performance of the application. And trust me knowing each of aspects mentioned in the tenets and acting upon it carefully can definitely help achieve positive outcome of the load test project.
Conclusion: On failure to comply by the standard processes of performance testing, at least incorporate the 7 tenets of performance testing which could help you to effectively compensate for those digressions from best practices.