Design tests for performance testing products

Relevant for: GUI tests only

Consider the following guidelines when designing tests for use with performance testing products:

  • The tests you use with LoadRunner Professional and LoadRunner Enterprise should be simple, designed to pinpoint specific operations, and should avoid using external actions and references to other external files (including resources stored in ALM). Also, when working with action iterations, corresponding StartTransaction and EndTransaction statements must be contained within the same action.

  • Every test must contain at least one transaction to provide useful information in the performance test. LoadRunner Professional and LoadRunner Enterprise use only the data that is included within a transaction, and ignore any data in a test outside of a transaction.

  • Do not include references to external actions or other external resources (including resources stored in ALM), such as an external data table file, environment variable file, shared object repositories, or function libraries. This is because LoadRunner Professional or LoadRunner Enterprise may not have access to the external action or resource.

    (However, if the resource can be found on the network, UFT One will use it. For example, you can try defining external resources via an absolute path, or by adding them as supplementary files and transferring them to Load Generator in the GUI test folder.)

  • Make sure that the last step(s) in the test closes the application being tested, as well as any child processes that are running. This enables the next iteration of the test to open the application again.

  • When measuring a distributed transaction over two different Business Process Monitor profiles or Business Transaction Flows (depending on the version), the profile with the StartDistributedTransaction statement must be run before the profile with the associated EndDistributedTransaction.

  • When measuring distributed transactions, make sure that you relate the tests to a single Business Process Monitor instance. Business Process Monitor searches for the end transaction name in all instances, and may close the wrong distributed transaction if it is included in more than one instance.

  • When measuring a distributed transaction over two Business Process Monitor profiles, make sure that the timeout value you specify is large enough so that the profile or Business Transaction Flow (depending on the version) that contains the StartDistributedTransaction step and all the profiles that run before the profile that contains the EndDistributedTransaction step, will finish running in a time that is less than the value of the specified timeout.