Apdex Alliance

In recent years, much has been written about the value of use cases and scenarios for capturing functional requirements; by comparison, their usefulness for performance management has received scant attention .  An application scenario defined for performance management purposes:

• Involves a known fixed workload
• Runs in the normal production environment
• Runs against the production databases
• Is instrumented to record response time

Because standard application scenarios are application/program instances with defined behaviors, their use of computing resources is also (relatively) predictable. In a sense, they are “benchmark” programs, since they perform a similar function. Normally however, performance benchmarks are designed to mimic a particular type of workload on a component or system, and are used to measure system capacity and throughput when processing a typically broad mix of applications.  Standard application scenarios, in contrast, can be designed to measure a system’s responsiveness for a single precisely-defined set of processing needs.

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