In a typical work place like a bank or insurance company, there will be many processes and it becomes impractical to test all the individual process elements for performance. In general, all the critical task elements are selected for creating the load rather than a complete business process.

In the workflow scenario, instead of taking a business process-based scripting approach, encompassing the entire business process, we need to take a task-based approach, which covers only the selected tasks of a business process. Tasks are otherwise called “Work items” in workflow terminology. Here, the scripting is done for each work-item according to the user role eligible to do that job as shown below. Each role logs in and repeats their assigned tasks and logs out at the end of the day.

In this approach if we run each script with different virtual users count, then it would simulate a real work environment like many roles doing different jobs. This will help us to create load to test the performance.

Execution challenges

While executing the load test, typically, all the virtual users need to see their work-related pages at the time of login. There should be a required amount of data in the application database to simulate the real-time environment. Additionally, the database needs to contain the real-time data to reflect the information on the task for all the virtual users while running the load test.

We can take different approaches to this, such as loading the database by scripts or running the load testing scripts multiple iteration for each task sequentially. Other challenges could be taking back-ups of the database after every load test cycle. This can be done with the required support from the database team.

Further minor challenges exist including environment set up, test data preparation, user profile creation and correlation, among others.

Conclusion

Workflow based business processes need a different approach, for conducting performance testing, in a single user business process scenario. Though the performance testing tool and the procedure is the same for conventional business processes and workflow based business processes, there are other differentiating factors including approach, design and execution methodologies.

In terms of design, data requirement and database loading activities, the workflow based model is more challenging than conventional business processes. A critical analysis of requirements, strategy and execution process is required for workflow based testing, much more so than single user business process performance testing.

(Author is Sr. Manager, QA, Virtusa Corporation)