SOFTWARE PERFORMANCE TESTING OPTIMIZATION USER SCENARIOS

Transcription

1 SOFTWARE PERFORMANCE TESTING OPTIMIZATION USER SCENARIOS

2 USER SCENARIOS The only thing that we can t make more of in life is time. Most of us know this at least subconsciously, so we wisely allocate our time in our personal lives between different people, places and activities. Our work lives are the same. We only have eight hours a day, so we must spend it carefully. With software performance testing, it s no different. There always seems to be too much to do and the list always seems to grow. Why? Because software has become more complex, user scenarios continue to increase, and so do the platforms that need to be tested. As software capabilities evolve, so do our expectations. These days, the infamous blue screen of death from a decade ago is intolerable. We ve gone far beyond it works functionality as businesses have come to rely on software as a critical element of the value they provide their customers. As such, most have come to realize that performance is a key to creating an exceptional user experience and beating their competition. One of the first things you do in performance testing is to develop a performance profile for the activities that users are going to execute. However, this can be a long list. Given that there are endless user scenarios to pursue, how do we begin to narrow down our focus and develop software performance testing scripts with the greatest bang for the buck? In other words, how can we apply the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule in layman s terms) to get the most return for our effort? We ve come up with a simple back of the envelope approach that narrows down focus in a logical way. BOSOFT.COM CONTACT US AT SERVICES@BOSOFT.COM

3 NARROWING THE FOCUS ON USER TASKS The first step in focusing is to look at the top five user tasks, the same thing you do when examining usability or user experience. You want to optimize those tasks from a usability point of view, so that means they must perform the best. Keep in mind there may be sub-tasks that go with a major task as well. If you can t come up with your top five tasks off the top of your head, that s okay. Just start by writing them down. Tasks could include: Check a patient into a facility 0 Assign patient to a doctor 2 Check a patient out of a facility Assign patient to a room and bed 3 Record a drug given to a patient 2 Create a facility 4 Enter an accounts receivable from an existing account 3 Update facilities equipment 5 Create an account 4 Add inventory 6 Enter in a patient s basic profile information 5 Correct inventory 7 Create a user with manager permissions 6 Make a sale 8 Create a user with reception privileges 7 Decommission a piece of equipment 9 Create a user with nurse privileges 8 Update maintenance for equipment BOSOFT.COM CONTACT US AT SERVICES@BOSOFT.COM 2

4 FREQUENT USE MEDIUM FREQUENCY INFREQUENT USE Very important Feature/Function, 2, 3, Medium Importance 2, 4 6, 6, 5 Less Importance, 5 5, 4 8, 8 Perhaps you have a list of existing scripts and want to know if you re getting the coverage you want. In this case you d examine your existing scripts and determine what user scenario they execute. Then you d list them out as we ve done above and again, place them into the matrix. You might find that your existing scripts don t really cover some of the cells in the matrix and that you need to supplement them. As a corollary to this method, you can simplify it further by having a 2x2 table and eliminating the Medium category. Once this is complete, we do our first prioritization by taking the three upper left cells in the matrix and color those blue. The next prioritized scenarios are the green, followed by orange. You may be tempted to make everything blue and treat everything as a high priority. Everything s important and we agree that they all are. However, when trying to prioritize the order of execution and work that you do, it s best to allocate them in this way. Now you re ready to write your performance testing scripts, right? Well, not quite. The next step is to execute the scenarios manually and write down step-by-step how each scenario is executed. In this process, you ll discover particularities about each scenario and be able to define them further. For instance, for checking in a patient to a facility, you ll examine the scroll downs and other entry fields, noting the most common ones, and noting outliers. On the other hand, while going through manually, step by step, you may reallocate that scenario to another cell because you made an error and now think it s more or less important than before. BOSOFT.COM CONTACT US AT SERVICES@BOSOFT.COM 3

5 A BIRD S-EYE VIEW ON PERFORMANCE The key to manual execution is to get a relative sense for each scenario s performance from a birds-eye view. What does this mean? It means simply assigning green, yellow and red (Fast, Medium and Slow) for relative performance for each of the scenarios so you can get a better idea of (what) you re working with. You set your own definitions of Slow, Medium and Fast so that you can definitively tell their differences, similar to the reason for using Fibonacci numbers for estimation. For example, Slow = 8-2 seconds Medium = seconds Fast = less than 4 seconds. When you do this, you ll get a table like this: SCENARIO ID SLOW MEDIUM FAST Table 2: Simple manual execution relative performance results BOSOFT.COM CONTACT US AT SERVICES@BOSOFT.COM 4

6 Now you re almost done! You may think (replace think with decide ) to just work on all the slow-performing scenarios, but you can still apply your priority matrix from Tables and 2 in the following way. BLUE: Write performance testing scripts for all user scenarios, whether Slow, Medium or Fast. These are critical and you want to establish benchmarks even for relatively fast user scenarios. (,2,3,4,9,2,7) 2 GREEN: Execute Slow and Medium. These are lower importance (than Blue), so to save time, just write scripts for Slow and Medium. (0,,5,6) 3 ORANGE: Again, to save time and to prioritize, simply write scripts for the slowest user scenarios. These are the ones you want to establish benchmarks for and have your programmers focus on first in terms of improving performance. (3) You can modify this approach in different ways to suit your resources. For instance, if you only want to write scripts for the Slow scenarios for Blue, that could reduce that set to, 4, 9 and 7. You may think this is a silly exercise and with only 8 scripts that we ve shown here, maybe you can script them all. But what if you have 00? Using this logical back of the envelope approach, you ll not only save time in writing your scripts, but you ll also be able to put forth effort where it counts the most. And with an app economy that offers free or low-cost subscription software applications with virtually non-existent switching costs or cancelation fees, users have options. If they are not satisfied, they can move on and delete you and your app. Performance is a key differentiator, so make sure you don t get left behind. If you face challenges in your performance testing efforts, contact us at BOSoft today. We are here to help. BOSOFT.COM CONTACT US AT SERVICES@BOSOFT.COM 5

7 ABOUT BOSOFT BOSoft is a software testing and quality assurance company that offers services in web, mobile and desktop applications, as well as broad domain experience with extended expertise in healthcare, finance, and software security. BOSoft s quality process assessments and test methodologies speed products to market and improve clients software quality and performance throughout the software s life cycle. With a proven track record working for Fortune 00 companies to small independent developers, BOSoft today has over 00 employees in San Francisco and Beijing offices serving clients in the US and Europe. As the firm surpasses its tenth year of continuous growth, BOSoft proudly offers its full range of testing and quality assurance as both onand off-shore services. CONTACT BOSOFT PHONE: services@xbosoft.com BOSOFT.COM CONTACT US AT SERVICES@BOSOFT.COM 6

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