Overall site development life cycle | Typical performance characteristics of a WebSphere Commerce site

Performance test life cycle

Here is brief description of what is involved at each stage of performance testing:

1. Plan the test.

   • Review and gather business requirements.

   • Review design documents:

     Ensure that the design is in line with the business requirements and contains all the necessary information that may be required to create test scenarios.

   • Write test plan.

   • Assign owners.

   • Create scripts or automation tools.

     Develop, customize, or maintain automation tools (for example, simulators) or automation scripts (for example, that simulate test cases).

   • Create scenarios.

     Create scenarios as per the approved test plan.

   • Execute scenario:

     • Prepare a test environment, if it was not done already for you:

       • Set up the WebSphere Commerce environment against which the test will be executed.

       • Set up the test environment. This will simulate the test client environment,on which the test scripts will be executed.

2. Execute the test.

3. Collect the logs and test the results for analysis as well as safe keeping for future reference.

4. Analyze and report the results.

   • Analyze the test results.

   • Analyze all defects or performance issues and concerns.

5. (Optional) Performance tune.

If the test results are not acceptable then we performance tune the system and re-execute the scenario. For example, the execution of the scenarios during the performance test will show which requests have poor response times. Profiling fits into this iterative process. Profiling the slow requests can help determine the root cause of their poor response times.