Developing use cases

When you design performance tests, your goal is to develop few use cases that adequately test the functions that are most frequently used and most important.

Procedure

  1. Determine how and when users log in and log off in the production environment. For example, do users stay logged in all day? Or do users log in, complete some transactions, and then log off?
  2. Identify workloads that reflect the workload distribution and the workload rate. Distribution is the percentage of users who are completing a specific task, such as creating service requests. The rate is the transaction rate for a specific task, such as the number of service requests. Develop use cases that reflect both the number of transactions and the frequency of transactions. For example, 20% of users are creating 10 service requests in an hour.
  3. Determine how user load changes throughout the course of the day. If you have real-time usage history, use the data for requests processed per second during peak hours to create your use case. Then, you can compare your real-time data with the server load created during the performance test to see how your deployment is functioning.
  4. Based on user behavior, workloads, and user loads, create use cases that focus on your test objectives.


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