As performance testing varies greatly, depending on your application and industry, it's important to consider the various roles and stakeholders in a test, and who to include.

Here are some key stakeholders you should consider and the roles they play throughout the performance testing process:

Customers or "End Users"

• Customers help shape the requirements of the application through feature requests, reported bugs, or general feedback.
• Customers play a key role in shaping performance testing requirements by helping your business analysts determine the appropriate service level agreements for the application.

Business Analysts, Project Managers, And Product Owners

• Business analysts, project managers and product owners provide business level targets to test managers. These targets can include elements like:
  
  • The application should be able to meet a user load greater than X users while meeting the service level agreements;
  • All pages should take less than one second to load upon request.
• These stakeholders should help ensure that test managers understand all performance level requirements (geography, application behaviour expected, device use, etc)
• These stakeholders should help test managers finalize all tests.

Performance Test Managers

• These stakeholders play a key role in the service level agreement identification process;
• These stakeholders create the performance test strategy and plan the necessary performance tests in the study;
• These stakeholders communicate all the requirements to the performance test analysts;
• The performance test manager's role, and the performance test analyst role, are the same individual.

Performance Test Analysts

• A performance test analyst plays a key role in performance testing projects as they understand the performance test requirements and convert those into business scripts, work flow models & documents;
• These stakeholders setup the test architecture, manage tool infrastructure, do performance test pre-setup tasks, execute tests, monitor tests and analyze the final results;
• These stakeholders compare the most recent results with the results from earlier versions and provide summary points from the performance test to each stakeholder;
• In the case of performance bugs, they log the issue and follow-up with developers and performance engineers to get those resolved;

Performance Engineers And Developers

• Performance engineers also play a key role in performance tests. In the case of any performance issues, they debug the system and resolve performance issues;
• These stakeholders check the technical performance of the service level agreements during the planning phase.

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