My last performance testing project was probably 2 years ago so the following info comes from memory.
I only worked on load and performance testing for web apps and web services so far.
The checklist applies to both with minimal changes.
If you prefer a mindmap to a long checklist, this is the link to it.
ANALYSIS
- What will be measured?
- application (web pages) response time
- throughput
- server resource utilization
- Pass/Fail criteria
- PASS: system performance during performance test <= baseline system performance
- FAIL
- system crashes during the load test
- system becomes un-responsive
- system performance during load test > baseline system performance
- Benchmark the system's performance under highest production load
- web pages' response times --> from Google Analytics
- server resource utilization --> from the Server Monitoring tools
- highest production application load
- busiest times of the app --> from Google Analytics
- highest number of concurrent users --> from the web server logs
- Define user scenarios
- get the most used pages from Google Analytics
- create a few user scenarios using the most used pages
- identify parameters of each page
- create test data for the parameters of each page
- Issues to be monitored
- application becomes not responsive
- application generates lots of errors under load
- the servers resources are heavily used
- application's response time is very high
- Performance testing environment isolation from production
- confirm that none of the components of the performance testing environment are used in production
PREPARATION
- Prepare test data
- Extract data from the production environment
- Modify it for the performance test
- Generate enough test data so it will not be re-used fast
- Performance test environment
- Application Environment
- Application Servers
- Web Servers
- Database Servers
- Media Servers
- Search Servers
- Networking devices
- Load Balancer
- Firewall
- Performance Testing Environment
- Performance Testing Servers
- Management Server
- Agent Servers
- Application Server Monitoring
- Web Servers - Performance Counters
- CPU
- Memory
- Disk
- Network
- Operating System
- Web Server
- Application (.NET)
- Database Servers - Performance Counters
- CPU
- Memory
- Disk
- Network
- Operating System
- DB counters
- Application stability before the performance testing
- Run complete functional testing of the app
- Confirm that no critical issues are present
- Create Scripts for the performance testing user scenarios
- Wait time between scripts steps
- random times
- script recording times
- Create transactions for script steps
- Create parameters in the scripts and connect them to the test data
- Synchronize users in the script
- Remove any 3rd party dependencies' impact on the application
- 3rd party dependencies
- banners
- partner sites
- google analytics
- point all the 3rd party domains to 127.0.0.1
- Identify browsers and bandwidth types to be used for scripts
- Set up the model of loading users (user ramping)
EXECUTION
- Start monitoring of the application environment
- Start the performance test
- Let the performance test go for a long time
- Stop the performance test
- Collect results
- Performance testing tool reports
- Server performance counters
- Web logs
- Analyze the results by comparing them with the baseline info
- Report issues
- Fix issues
- Make changes in the application environment
- Fix code bugs
- Fine tune the performance testing scripts
- Repeat the performance test
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