Performance Testing Activities and Tasks
What this domain tests
Performance Testing Activities and Tasks covers the performance test process from planning through reporting: objectives and KPIs, workload modeling, scenario design, scripting, execution, monitoring, analysis, and exit criteria. The exam tests sequencing and deliverables.
Core rules and concepts
- Planning defines objectives, scope, KPIs, risks, schedule, roles, environment, tools, data, and entry and exit criteria.
- Workload analysis builds user profiles, operational profiles (transaction mix), and load profiles (arrival pattern, peaks, duration).
- Design selects test types and scenarios, defines datasets, think times, pacing, and monitoring points.
- Implementation builds and validates scripts: parameterization, correlation, error handling, and a smoke test at low load.
- Execution runs baseline, load, stress, spike, and endurance scenarios as designed, capturing metrics and logs.
- Analysis compares results to criteria, identifies bottlenecks with monitoring and profiling data, and reports findings with evidence.
- Exit criteria should be measurable: KPI pass, error threshold, resource stability, and no unresolved critical defect.
Worked example
An online banking transfer journey has 300,000 daily users and a peak of 2,000 concurrent users. KPI: p95 < 2.5 s and errors < 0.1%. Plan: baseline at 10 users to validate scripts; load at 2,000 for 60 minutes; spike from 500 to 2,500; endurance at 80% of peak for 4 hours. Exit: all scenarios meet KPIs, CPU below 80% on each tier, and no upward memory trend. The reasoning: baseline isolates script errors, load proves the KPI, spike tests elasticity, and endurance exposes leaks; exit criteria prevent a no-errors-so-pass conclusion.
Traps
Executing before the workload model is agreed; skipping script validation; monitoring only the load generator; using production data without masking; declaring pass from a single run without steady-state analysis; having no entry criteria for environment readiness.