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Performance Testing - Protocol Selection, Script Recording

If you know one load testing tool, it is easy to learn another. You need to be clear in the load testing fundamentals, in order to learn a new tool and to master it. We will help you step by step in achieving that mastery over load testing tools. Let us take the first part of the tools, protocol selection.

Protocol is nothing but the format in which the client and server communicate with each other. Eg., http, https, ftp, smtp, wap, tcpip, rdp, etc. Every application developer must first freeze the protocol and architecture, as changing these at a later stage will mess up a whole lot of things. But for a load testing person, all it needs is to understand what goes as request and what comes as response. Ultimately every thing will go as a stream of bytes; but to operate on the requests for parameterization etc., the load tester must know the parts of the requests and parts of the response.

It is difficult to manage too many protocols and learning them at the bits and bytes level. Instead, if the tool can parse the request and response, and display the same in a clear user interface, most of the problems for the load tester are solved. The tester must refer to the design documents as well as consult with the development team to identify and choose the right protocols. A few applications may use multiple protocols to carry out a specific transaction; in that case, the tester must select all those protocols before recording the script.

The catch here is, that the load testing tools will charge you based on the protocol modules you want to buy! There will be a base license cost and there will be an add-on cost for every protocol module. You may be thinking that it is a simple web application, but that app may use Google Web Toolkit (GWT) or Flex related formats; without having those protocols as part of the tool, you cannot get a clean script. Hence one needs to be careful why purchasing the tool and add-on licenses.

Once you freeze the protocol, the you need to focus on scripts. We must create load testing script by recording a typical business scenario, as though one user is doing it on the application. For example, a user logs into an HR application, submits a travel request and logs out. The actual load test will send 100s of such requests (simulating 100s of users). The key point here is what scenarios we must record as part of scripting?

Identify the most frequently used user scenarios. All said and done, you and I go to google and do search 80% of the times. Some other person may go to google stocks page to get stock quotes. So, the user priorities vary. Though google has 1000s of pages, only a small set of pages are more frequently used, by most of the users. In the same manner, in your application, identify which are the most frequent ones and tabulate the same. How many users will execute those scripts, how long the users will run etc., we will deal with those in subsequent sections.

If you take any ecom site, the most frequently used scenarios are:

1. Go to home page, type a keyword, do a search, load search results, view an item from the results

2. Go to home page, type a keyword, do a search, load search results, view an item from the results, add to cart

3. Go to home page, type a keyword, do a search, load search results, view an item from the results, add to cart, provide payment details, buy

In the above 3 scenarios, many activities are common, but for every one customer actually buying, 100s of other customers, just "surf" and "window-shop" without adding to cart. Though they do not contribute to revenue, they occupy your system and network space. After attracting a customer to the site, thru marketing, it is very hard to see the customer abandoning the shopping cart without a buy! Usually these things happen due to slow response. So, buckle up, and make it faster!

 
 
 
 
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