performance testing requirement gathering questionnaire

As a performance tester or engineer , you should interact with various stakeholders to gather performance testing requirements ( also called as NFR’s –Non Functional requirements ).

I am going to provide an inside about my experience during this activity what kind of questions you should ask for various stakeholders.

Performance testing stakeholders (mainly below list of people you may contact for NFR’s ) :

1)      Developers

2)      Project Managers

3)      Business architects

4)      System architects

5)      DBA’s

6)      Capacity Manager

7)      Production monitoring teams if any?

Setting up a testing environment, which should be replica of the production environment is most important and fundamental aspect in performance testing and results will be based on that environment. Accurate performance results can never be achieved unless the production environment is not replicated.  Like it should scalable to PROD ( 50%, or 80% or 100% ). Adjust the load numbers based on the scaling factor .

Ask what kind of application it is ( web , Client/server model, back end jobs, middle ware calls , etc …)?

How that application being used on LIVE (end users, admins , stores managers , etc…)?

Find out the key Business scenarios  (based on the traffic on the site) ?

Find out the max number of concurrent users it can support ?

Find out the SLA’s for those  Business scenarios ? Users ,Response times, throughput levels ( TPS, etc) , Servers utilization .

Type of Performance tests needs to be required ( Load , Soak , Stress tests , etc…  it depends on what is your performance goal) , for example if you are looking for to check if any memory leaks exists on your application than go for soak test , if you want to find out break even point (How many concurrent users your application supports ) than go for Stress tests, etc….

As per my experience you can ask n number of questions during requirements gathering but mainly focus on key areas which are below

Performance SLA’s

Application architecture

Load Model

Servers (App/DB/Web and Middle wares) access

Servers resource utilization threshold values ( <70% generally )

Tools & Environments ( which tool needs to use and performance test environment details ).

Monitoring tools available ( Site scope, Wily , Dyna trace , etc..)

 A typical Application architecture looks like this for 3-tier :