Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation

Chapter 9. Testing Nonfunctional Requirements

Introduction

We have described various aspects of automating the testing of an application as part of the process of implementing a deployment pipeline. However, so far our focus has been mostly on testing those behaviors of the application commonly described as functional requirements. In this chapter, we will describe our approach to testing nonfunctional requirements, with a specific focus on testing capacity, throughput, and performance.

First of all, let’s clear up some confusion around the terms. We’ll use the same terminology as Michael Nygard.¹ To paraphrase, performance is a measure of the time taken to process a single transaction, and can be measured either in isolation or under load. ...