What is System Performance Testing

Performance testing is one of the vital activities spanning the whole life cycle of software engineering. As a result, there are a considerable number of performance testing products and open source tools available. It has been observed that most of the existing performance testing products and tools are either too expensive and complicated for small projects, or too specific and simple for diverse performance tests. In this chapter, we will present an overview of existing performance test products/tools, provide a summary of some of the contemporary system performance testing frameworks, and capture the key requirements for a general-purpose performance testing framework. Based on our previous works, we propose a system performance testing framework which is suitable for both simple and small, as well as complicated and large-scale performance testing projects. The core of our framework contains an abstraction to facilitate performance testing by separating the application logic from the common performance testing functionality, and a set of general-purpose data model.