Risk Assessment In Performance Testing
Performance Testing coverage needs to be defined from the application under tests functional requirements and this does not change regardless of whether you are following an Agile or a more Planned approach.
The Risk Assessment process defines what performance testing needs to be executed and the order in which this should be approached, the reason we use the functional test requirements for definition of coverage as these functional requirements define what the system does whereas the non-functional requirements are what you use to measure your tests against when you execute them.
As discussed the Risk Assessment is a way of identifying where your performance testing effort should be focussed and prioritising the order in which your performance tests are written and therefore executed so you ensure that you are focussing on the riskiest, from a performance perspective, aspects of the system first; we will expand on what we mean by riskiest later in this post.
A Risks Assessment should be done as early in the project or sprint, if you are working in an Agile methodology, as is possible to maximise its benefits.
The first thing we will discuss is the differences between Agile and Non-Agile Risk Assessment as this is an important concept but only as far as what is assessed and when, the principles of how and why we carry out a risk assessment will become clear as you read this post and remain the same regardless of your approach to development.