Documentation and Agile Performance Testing
Once upon a time documentation was one of the most important aspects of Quality Assurance and this was not limited to the functional test efforts but the non-functional testing as well.
We spent days, weeks, months even creating Performance Test Strategies, Approaches, Plans, Test Case, Completion Reports etc.
Most of these documents were required before any automation could be written and before a sensible performance testing framework could be considered.
It was expected before performance testing began, during the performance test cycles and after the tests completed it was a constant cycles of documentation creation, review, update, review and sign-off.
With a bit of Performance Testing in the middle.
Surely many of us remember the difficulty in getting some of these significant and lengthy documents approved by many, many stakeholders.
Before I go on to tell you why documentation is overrated I want to caveat it with the fact that for some organisations it is a necessity as they are following the wishes of their customers and clients, and for some organisations they still follow a strict waterfall approach to software development and their way of working delivers for their organisation.
This is all fine, this post is more about Documentation for Performance Testing in Agile Delivery and this is an important distinction.