IBM Rational Performance Tester Best Practices

Following the guidelines, standards and best practices will help to accomplish the mission with optimum effort and time. In this blog post, we will see about IBM Rational Performance Tester Best Practices. This is purely based on my experience. If you feel that I missed out anything, please mention in the comments section.

IBM Rational Performance Tester is a performance testing tool which simulates the real time users to validate the non-functional aspects of system under test. Following are the stuffs that you could follow in your project:

1.     Naming Conventions

Following the naming conventions across the project will help testers to have better readability. Naming conventions should define in performance test strategy document. Below are the items needs naming conventions:

• Project Workspace
• Performance Test Project
• New Recording
• New Test
• Data Parameters
• Correlations Values/References
• Correlation Rule Sets
• Performance Test Schedule
• Each Requests in the test script
• Performance Test Results
• Loops
• Transactions
• Random Selector
• Custom Code
• Verification Points

2.     Enable Response Time Break down

Enabling response time break down helps testers to know how much time took for each part of the requests. This requires application server locations where data needs to be collected and placed.

To enable response time break down, follow below steps:

• Open RPT Test
• Click on parent node
• In Test Elements Details (right side of the window), click on HTTP Options tab.
• Check Enable response time breakdown checkbox

 3.     Browser Delay

RPT saves browser delay during recording, even if the browser is not expecting some elements from the serve e.g. third party browser add-ons, plugins etc. Those delays will be recorded and it may impact the replay. If you feel the response time is very high, you may the change the browser delay which sets the value globally.

Follow the below steps:

• Open RPT Test
• Click on parent node
• In Test Elements Details (right side of the window), click on HTTP Options tab.
• Move the slider under Playback speed (Shorter, Normal, and Longer). Reset button resets the value.
  

4.     Ignore object response time

RPT provides option to ignore embedded object response times. Say you have 10 secondary requests which send requests to load images, you want to ignore during playback. Follow below steps to enable or disable secondary requests:

• Open RPT Test
• Click on parent node
• In Test Elements Details (right side of the window), click on HTTP Options tab.
• Click on Modify button as shown below

• Check the Images and click on Disable button which disables all requests which has *.gif,*.jpg,*.png,*.bmp,*.tif (to mention custom file extension, click on Add… button)

• To disable all secondary requests, check All secondary and then click on Disable button.

In next post we will see more useful best practices of IBM Rational Performance Tester.

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