Chapter 7. Test Scripts

Test scripts drive the performance test. The scripts simulate the series of requests a user makes during a visit to the web site. In order to develop test scripts, you need to understand the expected behavior of your production users. Usually, the performance test requires a series of scripts to represent a range of production users. In this chapter, we'll walk through this process for a sample application that you may already be familiar with, the Pet Store demo from Sun Microsystems. ^[1] As we mentioned in the previous chapter, a poor understanding of your users leads to poor test scripts. During your test planning phase, find out how users interact with your web applications.

^[1] Pet Store is a sample J2EE application provided by Sun Microsystems, and is available from <http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/releases/petstore/>.