Case Study Assumptions

This case study examines a portion of the performance test cycle for a fictitious e-Commerce company. We decided to use an e-Commerce web site for several reasons.

• The high graphical content of their pages tends to stress the network.

• Many retail sites receive sustained bursts of traffic at the holiday season , which requires us to plan for these peak load periods.

• These sites tend toward higher complexity with various databases on the back end and some special servers to assist with graphic content on the front end.

In short, e-Commerce web sites give us the broadest demonstration of the concepts we discuss in the book.

We decided to make our fictional e-Commerce company fairly large. As you'll notice when you read the case study, our fictional retailer receives 100,000 users per day during the peak season. That's a significant amount of traffic for an e-Commerce retailer, and does not apply to most of the e-Commerce sites we see. On the other hand, 100,000 user visits per day is not the largest site we've ever encountered , and certainly does not put our fictional web site among the Internet's heavy hitters.

A large web site allows us to better demonstrate some of the techniques of test planning more thoroughly (and on a grand scale). It also allows us to illustrate a very important point: Don't be afraid of large numbers . You can develop manageable and correct performance tests, even for large web sites. This case study addresses the highlights of a performance test cycle. Obviously, we can't cover every potential issue, or even address in depth some of the issues our fictional team uncovers. However the case study gives you a feel for an actual test cycle.