Performance By Design

Performance testing is one of the most important practices associated with applying software performance engineering principles to acceptance testing and other quality assurance processes. This blog entry discusses the key role scalability models play in performance testing. A scalability model hypothesizes a relationship between a performance-oriented response time or throughput goal for a scenario and one or more scalability dimensions associated with that specific scenario. One such scalability dimension, the arrival rate of customer requests, is a staple of performance stress tests, for example. One of the main assertions here is the value of making explicit the scalability assumptions that are implicit in defining performance acceptance testing criteria. Assumptions about the dimensions of an application’s scalability inform the definition of an appropriate performance test matrix to ensure the testing process is both rigorous and effective. Furthermore, feedback from empi...