Agile testing | 23
that we are maximising the use of our infrastructure that supports the
performance test window and not application. The cumulative effect
wasting valuable test time on ‘nice of performance degradation over
to haves’. monthly releases results in a more
In agile development there is an significant annual performance
increased likelihood of functional degradation.
and environmental defects in the
performance test environment. Meeting the challenge
The code may still be under Capacitas adapted its approach in a
development during the Sprint number of ways to meet the challenge
process. Therefore the code released of agile development. More detailed Performance testing in
into the performance test environment planning is done during the production
an agile environment
has a greater probability of having of the performance risk assessment
has presented many
defects. Resolving these defects can and test plan. The performance risk
consume a significant amount of assessment is used to determine what
challenges. These largely
the performance test time window needs to be tested depending on the
arise from working
and leave less time for actual risk to the production system. This
within a shorter test time
performance testing. ensures that low risk changes are
frame than in traditional
The frequent code changes to not tested while medium to high
accommodate smaller functionality risk code changes are tested,
development approaches.
changes are also challenging. The therefore maximising the usage of
small changes can result in re-writes the test window.
of previous test scripts and hence The performance test plan typically
increase the overall scripting time and has fewer tests in recognition of the
leave less time for actual performance reduced testing time window but the
testing. This can also increase the tests may include greater coverage, eg
overall testing costs. a customer selects all available options
The overlap in monthly releases may rather than a selection. Capacitas may
cause resourcing issues, eg planning only aim to do three to four tests in
for the next release while conducting an agile release. Potentially, there will
testing for the current release. This be multiple iterations of each of these
can potentially take away valuable tests depending on the frequency of
resource from the performance testing code drops into the performance
of the existing release and further test environment.
impact the time frames. During a test all capacity and
In addition to the challenges performance metrics are collected
around time and resources, there are but not all are necessarily analysed.
additional challenges in terms of the This ensures that, as long as high level
potential performance degradation performance and capacity metrics
per release. As new features are such as response times, error rates
introduced, these new features and CPU service times are acceptable,
will inevitably use resource of the then no further analysis is required. If
T.E.S.T | March 09 March 09 | T.E.S.T
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