Performance Testing 101: A Performance Testing Questionnaire

This is the seventh and final installment in a multi-part series to address the basics of performance testing applications. It’s for the beginner, but it is also for the experienced engineer to share with project team members when educating them on the basics as well. Project Managers, Server Team members, Business Analysts, and other roles can utilize this information as a guide to understanding performance testing process, the typical considerations, and how to get started when you have never embarked on such a journey.

It’s a good idea to put together a set of questions to assist in gathering all of the information needed to create performance tests that match the needs of the business. We have been covering all of the areas of consideration in this blog series. Now it’s time to get all of that information and put it somewhere that can be referenced and used as a guideline to create automated scripts and test scenarios.

Below is a very basic starting point to give an idea of how to organize this information. Use this to create a custom one for your projects and add/modify based on your needs. As time goes by and more projects are completed, the need to expand the questionnaire will generally expand to include more things. This is just an example. It’s a good idea to work with Project Managers when creating tasks, timelines, and milestones to ensure you are including everything and embedding the performance test activities into the overall larger project.

System Description

<Describe your system here. What is the architecture (i.e. single-tier, multi-tier), technology (i.e. web, mainframe, database), and audience.>

Questions

Please provide as much detail while answering the following questions.

• How many concurrent users do you expect to use the system in production?
• Is there an environment available for performance testing?
• How does the performance testing environment compare to production?
• Has the system been performance tested previously?
• What was the outcome of the previous performance tests?
• What challenges currently exist in the system which might be resolved by performance testing?
• What do you hope to accomplish through performance testing the system?

This concludes our series on Performance Testing 101. As always, we encourage your feedback, questions, comments, and concerns.