During my daily business I am often confronted with the topic “performance”, but sadly not that often with “performance test”. Like the common admin-quote “No one wants backup, everyone wants restore” I could say “No one pays for performance benchmarking and optimization, but everyone wants to have a fast website“.
The fact, that performance testing is often postponed in project plans, has 2 common sources: Either performance is considered as second-class citizen in a project, which is always overruled by its cousin “functional testing”. Or noone knows how to do proper performance testing, and everyone decides, that ignoring this topic makes it go away. Nice try …
As a starter I would recommend to read my series about Performance test modelling:
- Part 1: What is a performance test?
- Part 2: What is the relevance of “number of concurrent users”?
- Part 3: What is the impact of the test system and test data?
- Part 4: What scenarios should be covered?
- Part 5: What do to when the test results do not match with production?
Also I wrote individual posts about the topic of performance tests, which cover specific aspects of it:
Things on a content management system 
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