Most projects, big important ones, have a person or team assigned to test the application. These people must create and run hundreds of tests to verify the system. If the team is well organized and has sufficient resources, they probably have their tests recorded in some way to reduce their work load. This can be a great source of test data and code for the performance engineer. Instead of inventing everything needed for performance evaluation, all that is needed is some conversion code and perhaps a way to adapt the test code to the performance tool. The hundreds of tests are already captured in some way, you just need to create some method for making them usable. First look at how the tests are captured. Is it in XML, serialized objects, perhaps spreadsheets? A conversion program can be used to make the data they contain usable, or an adapter can be written that is able to read the files and extract the needed data. This work though tedious, will save tons of time that would have been spent creating tests. It also means that the testing group can continue their work of creating new tests, updating old ones, and fixing ones with problems. All that work can be reused and save a great deal of time for the performance engineer.
Posted under Performance, Test Data
This post was written by robert.casto on May 26, 2009
