Report early and report often
of a performance-testing project. However, not all of the information and data to be
shared needs to take the form of a formal or semiformal report. One effective approach is
to send stakeholders summary charts and tables every day or two in an e-mail message
that contains a concise statement of key points. Use the feedback and questions you
receive from those stakeholders when deciding what to put in the next formal or
semiformal report. In this way you can gauge the needs of your audience before writing
what is intended to be a stand-alone or final document.
Sharing information and data with the technical team can be an even more
straightforward process. It may be as simple as posting the location of the new results
files to a team wiki before you begin analyzing them, and then posting links to any charts
and graphs that derive from your analysis.
digest. This is especially true of performance results data, where the volume of data is
frequently very large and most significant findings result from detecting patterns in the
data. It is possible to find these patterns by scanning through tables or by using complex
mathematical algorithms, but the human eye is far quicker and more accurate in the vast
majority of cases.
Once a pattern or "point of interest" has been identified visually, you will typically want
to isolate that pattern by removing the remaining "chart noise." In this context, chart
noise includes all of the data points representing activities and time slices that contain no
points of interest (that is, the ones that look like you expect them to). Removing the chart
noise enables you to more clearly evaluate the pattern you are interested in, and makes
reports more clear.
leaves the reader with questions as to why the information is important, the report has
failed. While reports do not need to provide the answers to issues to be effective, the
issues should be quickly and intuitively clear from the presentation.
One method to validate the intuitiveness of a report is to remove all labels or identifiers
from charts and graphs and all identifying information from narratives and then present
the report to someone unfamiliar with the project. If that person is able to quickly and
correctly point to the issue of concern in the chart or graph, or identify why the issue
discussed in the narrative is relevant, then you have created an intuitive report.
software developers, testers, and managers either do not have strong backgrounds in or