A Checklist for Performance Testing – Requirement Questionnaire

A Checklist for elicitation of the Performance Testing Requirements.

Performance Testing of an application involves the various phases outlined below. This article is an attempt to   provide a list of questionnaire that can help the test leaders/managers and testers to elicitate the performance testing requirements. This information is most important to know before starting with the performance test. Note that the questionnaire provided here is generic list of questions that is common to most of the applications. However, it need to be tailored based on the nature of the application under test. Usually I use this questionnaire by sending it to the stake holders of the application for answering. I have been using this questionnaire successfully for conducting performance tests.

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Performance Testing Requirement Questionnaire

1. Please provide the URI's and credentials of the application for testing
2. Please provide the test environment (Hardware and Software) configuration.
3. Where is the test environment setup? – Inside the Firewall in a isolated LAN environment or outside the firewall.
4. What technologies have been used to develop the application?
5. What are the interfaces of the application? e.g., Payment gateways, web services etc.,
6. Briefly describe the business/domain of the application.
7. Is the application already in production? - Is this performance testing being conducted pre-production or post-production?
8. Are the web server logs for the application available? Applicable only if the application is already in production.
9. What are the critical workflows of the application to be considered as candidates for performance testing?
10. What is the expected workload (number of simultaneous virtual users) to be tested?
11. What is the average session duration of a user? - Average time a user would be logged into the application.
12. How many hours in a day the application would be available/accessed by the users?
13. Do you have any specific performance objective(SLAs) for this test? E.g. 1000 Invoices to be processed in a Day
14. Is test data required for performance testing available in adequate quantity in the required format.
15. Does the test team members have the  necessary privileges for the test server machines.
16. Do you aware of any performance problems in the application that is experienced by the users or observed by other stake holders?

--LN