Identifying Performance Acceptance Criteria

It generally makes most sense to start identifying, or at least estimating, the desired performance characteristics early in the application development life cycle. Record the performance characteristics that your users and stakeholders would equate to a successfully performing application, in a manner that is appropriate to your project’s standards and expectations.
Characteristics that frequently correlate to a user’s or stakeholder’s satisfaction typically include:

• Business Performance indicators identified; orders per second (Normal and peak), Help desk calls per hour
• Workload modeling for the business performance indicators. Example number of users for normal and peal loads
• Key Performance indicators identified: response time, throughput, utilization levels for processor, network, disk and memory.
• Resource utilization mapping to the business objectives; for example database transactions/messages/searches per second to satisfy number of orders or help desk calls per hour.

Response time: For example, the product catalog must be displayed in less than three seconds.
Throughput: For example, the system must support 100 transactions per second.
Resource utilization: For example, CPU utilization is not more than 75 percent. Other important resources that need to be considered for setting objectives are memory, disk I/O, and network I/O.