Matt Maccaux

Performance testing a J2EE application can be a daunting and seemingly confusing task if you don't approach it with the proper plan in place. As with any software development process, you must gather requirements, understand the business needs, and lay out a formal schedule well in advance of the actual testing. The requirements for the performance testing should be driven by the needs of the business and should be explained with a set of use cases. These can be based on historical data (say, what the load pattern was on the server for a week) or on approximations based on anticipated usage. Once you have an understanding of what you need to test, you need to look at how you want to test your application. Early on in the development cycle, benchmark tests should be used... (more)