Interpreting and Reporting Performance Test Results

You’ve worked hard to define, develop and execute a performance test on a new application to determine its behavior under load. You have barrels full of numbers. What’s next? The answer is definitely NOT to generate and send a canned report from the testing tool! Results interpretation and reporting is where a performance tester earns their keep.

We’ll start by looking at results from actual projects and together puzzle out the essential message in each. This will be a highly interactive session where we’ll display a graph, provide a little context, and ask “what do you see here?” We’ll form hypotheses, draw tentative conclusions, and identify graphs that give us the best insight on system performance and bottlenecks. We’ll try to describe these analytic steps, and consider a CAVIAR approach for collecting and evaluating test results: Collecting, Aggregating, Visualizing, Interpreting, Analyzing, Reporting