Target criteria
The target criteria are the business scenarios that are given to the benchmarking team for planning benchmarking tests. Here are three typical types of target criteria.
| Mapping business requirements to the benchmark |
The benchmark should reflect the business requirements and provide enough information to ascertain that the Web application can be used to fulfill the business requirements. The benchmark should be selected based on the type of Web application under consideration: an online store may worry most about the number of orders the application can handle, while an online download site may worry most about the download speed.
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| Predicting workload for special events |
Every year, e-Commerce sites see seasonal peaks of shopping activity, Christmas gift sales or back-to-school supply sales being familiar examples. What the possible workload will be during such special events and how the system can handle it need to be considered early.
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| Estimating long-term system status |
A Web application can be expected to operate for several years. We would like have a rough idea about how many new users will be registered, how many new products will be added, how many orders will be placed, and so on, over the course of its operation. This kind of information should be considered during benchmarking setup.