New ways to verify that you meet requirements

The final objective of any performance test is to verify that your application can meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the expected level of performance and reliability when deployed into production. With Release 8.1, we've added the concept of performance requirements so that you can immediately validate those objectives at the end of your performance test. You get multiple levels of detail and a simple way to visualize the quality of your performance results.

With these new features, you can specify high-level performance requirements against overall page responses and transaction times, as well low-level requirements on specific pages, transactions, and page elements of your Web application. In addition, percentile requirements, sample counts, and verification point failures can all be tracked to validate the overall quality of your measurements. You can also specify requirements against system resources counters available through the agent-less resource monitoring. This means that you can verify the health of the application systems for the duration of your test run.

Performance requirements are rolled up into an overall Pass or Fail verdict for the test. You can classify requirements as supplemental if you do not want their results to affect the overall verdict. The final verdict and primary and supplemental requirements reports are also passed to Rational Quality Manager when test execution is launched through its UI. (See Figures 1 and 2.)

Larger view of Figure 1.

Larger view of Figure 2.

Performance margins provide a graphical view so that you can quickly assess your current status against Service Level Agreements. For any given requirement, a large positive bar indicates that a requirement has been met with plenty of headroom to spare; a large negative bar shows that there is much to improve before a requirement is met. A bar close to the zero axis show that your application is borderline in meeting your requirement and you have little or no headroom to accommodate additional user load. This provides a simple way to identify your areas of risk.

With another new reporting feature, conditional color palettes, you can quickly highlight values in tables and reports by attaching colors to value ranges. You can apply these rules on-the-fly for a test run or save the rules in the report template and automatically apply them to every test run.

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Annotate and split tests

Starting with Release 8.1, you can insert test annotations at test record time for the HTTP and Siebel protocols. You can use test comments to document your steps as you capture your test scenario (see Figure 3). You can also add transactions into your test and assign a specific name to an HTTP page. These features are particularly useful when working in Web 2.0 applications where the Web UI might generate many actions from the same HTTP page.

Larger view of Figure 3.

By using the split test feature, you can reorganize the modularity of your test after recording (Figure 4). For example, you can derive Login, Transaction, and Logout test sequences from a single test recording. Test variables are automatically created so that you can connect these new individual components into different scenarios.

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Simplify visualizing encoded data and data transformations

Rational Performance Tester now provides built-in transformations in the HTTP test editor. These enable you to edit and perform data substitutions and correlations in binary data. Transformations are also extensible to accommodate custom data formats.

Release 8.1 also includes a binary editor view for HTTP, Socket, and Siebel tests (Figure 5). You can use this to apply different transformations to simplify visualizing binary data. Available transforms include ASCII, EBCIDIC, UTF, and other language variants.

Larger view of Figure 5.

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Other enhancements

The 8.1 release of Rational Performance Tester also includes these additional features:

• The live browser rendering view can now be launched in multi-user tests to view any virtual user, and it can be replayed after completion of the test.
• Percentile reports are now available during the performance test run, and no longer depend on the test log level.
• Resource monitoring now includes support for JBoss and IBM® WebSphere® application servers.
• The Citrix extension now provides a load agent dashboard and a multi-user monitor.
• Rational Performance Tester can now stop individual users and tests from running custom code.
• Test launch time is significantly reduced.

See Resources for where to find more details about features and where you can download free trials and extensions for Rational Performance Tester.

Resources

Learn

• Explore the Rational Performance Tester page on IBM® developerWorks® for links to technical information for software developers and testers and to related IBM software.
  
  
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• Learn more on the Rational Performance Tester product page.
  
  
• Learn about other applications in the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, including collaboration tools for parallel development and geographically dispersed teams, plus specialized software for architecture management, asset management, change and release management, integrated requirements management, process and portfolio management, and quality management.
  
  
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• Explore Rational computer-based, Web-based, and instructor-led online courses. Hone your skills and learn more about Rational tools with these courses, which range from introductory to advanced. The courses on this catalog are available for purchase through computer-based training or Web-based training. Additionally, some "Getting Started" courses are available free of charge.
  
  
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Discuss

• Join the Performance Testing forum, where you can share you questions and knowledge about IBM performance testing products, including IBM Rational Performance Tester (now integrated with IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit). General performance testing, VU scripting, and load testing topics are also discussed in this forum.
  
  
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Table of contents

• New ways to verify that you meet requirements
• Annotate and split tests
• Simplify visualizing encoded data and data transformations
• Other enhancements
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

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