How should i report performance issues without performance requirements?

Question

We don't currently have any performance requirements for application.
However, during manual testing I am noticing several performance issues with slow pages.
How should i report these apparent performance issues when I don't have any specific performance specifications that I can refer to?

Answer 1

If you have no requirements identified, but you consider it to be a significant issue then you report the issue and indicate that fact. This is quite common in Agile environments where requirements are a discovery process from using the application.

The organization will then need to decide:

• Should they address the issue without a typical upfront specification?
• Should they take some time to document and specify performance requirements?
• What performance requirements should the company add?
• What customer experience is acceptable for users on low bandwidth connections?

It will also depend on whether you noticed this anecdotally when running tests vs. specific performance testing. If found anecdotally you should file the bug and let your organization know that there are performance issues not covered by requirements. If found through specific performance testing then your organization should create a process (e.g. write a ticket) when the performance testing finds an issue.

Answer 2

You can check with your SME or senior architect available regarding below points.

What are the acceptable level of benchmarks in the current feature? Can we compare these test results with that system? If not can we have a measurement criteria for benchmarking our current system or application?

Hopefully your query will be resolved. If you are not getting a satisfactory answer for that you need to find out a generic benchmarking level for the same.

Answer 3

Depending on where and how your application is going to be used performance can be not that critical, i.e. internal portal with information about your company performance is not that critical as for e-commerce shop during the black friday.

However I believe as a test engineer you should report everything which seems incorrect to you. Analyze page loading process as deep as possible using Developer Tools which come with your browser or more advanced solutions like YSlow.

If you have enough capacity to investigate the issue on your own you can quickly create a simple load test using one of free and open source load testing tools, normally all of them provide record-and-replay functionality and try to correlate increasing number of users concurrently accessing the application with other metrics like response time, transactions per second, etc.