Software Testing Methodology Question:

Scalability and performance testing is the way to understand how the system will handle the load cause by many concurrent users. In a Web environment concurrent use is measured as simply the number of users making requests at the same time.

Performance testing is designed to measure how quickly the program completes a given task. The primary objective is to determine whether the processing speed is acceptable in all parts of the program. If explicit requirements specify program performance, then performance test are often performed as acceptance tests.

As a rule, performance tests are easy to automate. This makes sense above all when you want to make a performance comparison of different system conditions while using the user interface. The capture and automatic replay of user actions during testing eliminates variations in response times.

This type of test should be designed to verify response and excution time. Bottlenecks in a system are generally found during this stage of testing.