Advanced IBM Rational Performance Tester
Course Summary
This advanced course is designed to enhance a student's knowledge of the performance testing lifecycle using IBM Rational Performance Tester. Web-based applications are the focus of the class, during which students are provided insight into the architecture of web-based applications, implications upon test planning, automation, execution, and analysis. The course includes lecture and classroom discussion, with an emphasis on student exercises and labs applicable to real-world web applications and challenges. Extensive data correlation and parameterization techniques are addressed in the context of standard web clients, rich web clients, and desktop web clients. The course will require extensive Java programming in order to address the needs of business process automation and its requirements to properly model an application's end-user experience.
Intended Audience
Users intending to be immersed within the performance testing life cycle, including the following:
- Performance Engineers
- Test Automation Engineers
- Quality Assurance Engineers
- Course Objectives
- Course Outline
- Prerequisites
At the end of the course, you will be able to:
- Understand the fundamentals of a performance testing methodology in conjunction with the IBM Rational Performance Tester software
- Recognize the challenges and solutions for testing different web application architectures
- Comprehend the essentials of analyzing end-user perceived performance and system performance with the goal of achieving optimal application scalability
Performance Testing Methodology
- Exploration of the performance testing concepts, strategies and terminology
- Understanding the performance testing process
Test Planning
- Overview of web architecture and its implications upon Rational Performance Tester
- Workload analysis and component monitoring strategies
Test Automation
- Best practices for business process automation, such as navigational modularization and creating reusable automated test assets
- Approaching service level reporting by measuring business process response time, reliability, and application availability
- Detecting application layer errors and advanced error handling
- Advanced data correlation, including the random selection from lists, such as HTML form option values and lists of hyperlinks
- Testing rich web clients that use custom controls, such as ActiveX controls and Java applets, as well as desktop web clients
- Testing file uploads and other complex HTML forms that use multi-part form data
- Testing service-oriented architectures (SOA), such as web services
Test Execution
- Test tool playback architecture
- Test tool playback optimization
- Component performance monitoring and tuning
- Best practices for executing tests
Test Analysis
- Understanding statistics and presenting applicable results
- Performing root cause analysis
- Best practices for presentation of results
- Ancillary tools for analysis, such as Microsoft Excel
Java programming experience, including the following topics:
- Experience working within the Eclipse platform
- Basic object-oriented concepts, including class and method creation
- String Manipulation (String and StringBuffer classes)
- Regular Expressions (Pattern and Matcher classes)
- Java containers (Hashmap, ArrayList and Vector classes)
- File I/O (Streams, RandomAccessFile class)
- Flow Control (looping, conditional statements)