Performance Testing Dependencies

A dependency is something you rely upon to achieve an objective or a goal, but that is not under your control. This article will highlight the types of dependencies you may come across when performance testing and list our other resources to help in getting you up to speed and comfortable with the best practices in this area. The dependencies for a performance testing project can be broken down into the following categories- 

Business & Technical Dependencies

• Business Processes/Requirements. For more information refer to our article Performance Test Objectives and Requirements. It is vital prior to any testing that you have a set of requirements/business processes to test against.
• Architecture – The hardware/architecture needs to be defined.
• Volumetrics – For more information refer to our article Performance Modelling – Creating an accurate performance model. Again it is important to have volumetrics to be able to create the performance models you wish to test against.

Environmental Dependencies

• An environment needs to be provided and the specification of this is key for performance testing. For more information refer to our article on Test Environment-Considerations for Performance Testing.

Test Tools Dependencies

• Once the tool has been selected, For more information refer to our article Performance Testing Tools – Test Tool Analysis the tool will need to be installed.

Test Data Dependencies

• Data is another key dependency and will need to be agreed and sourced prior to performance test execution. For more information refer to our article on Data Considerations for Performance Testing

Monitoring Dependencies

• Before executing a performance test, it’s important that monitoring is setup. For more information refer to the following articles around the setting up of monitors
• Monitoring Operating Systems
• Monitoring Databases
• Monitoring Network

Support Dependencies

• The following support resources should be available during the performance test to investigate any issues/bottlenecks that may arise from the monitoring you perform.
• Network resource – To support/investigate any network bottlenecks. R
• Database resource – To support/investigate any database bottlenecks e.g poorly written queries.
• Application/Developer resource – To support/investigate any application bottlenecks e.g. poorly written code
• Server resource – To support/investigate any server bottlenecks e.g. CPU, Memory issues.
• PC/Desktop resource – To support/investigate any client/desktop bottlenecks.

As you can see there are several dependencies that need to be considered prior to performance testing.

To see how SQA Consulting may assist your company in performance testing your applications, please contact us.