We call a tested software "application". To select the application, namely the operations that will be tested, it is necessary to carry out work connected with the study of the application. Very useful in this case should provide application developers, when it comes to testing in the development, or business users and system administrators if the application is in operation. In the process, it is reasonable to the following steps:
- Describe the components of the application and make a scheme of interaction between them
- Highlight the critical terms of the proposed testing operations. As such, they can be selected:
Once again I want to note that the survey of business users or a joint study with the developers and system administrators can greatly simplify the task. If the application is in operation, it is possible to monitor the download server hardware components (processor, memory, disk) and examine the system logs of web servers (remove stats pack, if a database server, for example, using Oracle). System logs can show the peaks of high user activity during the day and give a quantitative estimate of how many transactions (hits) is performed in unit time. According to the law or the Pareto principle of 20/80, 20% of an application generates 80% of the load on the system, so you should try to choose to model these operations, 20%.