Experience with Teaching Performance Measurement and Testing in a Course on Functional Testing

Stevens Institute of Technology offers a graduate course on functional software testing that addresses test planning driven by use cases, the use of software tools, and the derivation of test cases to achieve coverage with minimal effort. The course also contains material on performance testing. Teaching performance testing and measurement in a university setting was challenging because giving the students access to a target system would have required more time, resources, and planning than were available. %neither the students nor the university typically have access to a system that can be tested and measured. We addressed these challenges (a) by showing the students how resource usage could be measured in a controlled way with the instrumentation that comes with most modern laptops by default, and (b) by having the students use JMeter to measure the response times of existing websites . We describe how students were introduced to the concept of a controlled performance test by playing recordings of the same musical piece with and without video. We make recommendations for the future avoidance of the emergent ethical issue that one should not subject one does not own to anything but the most trivial loads. We also describe some successes and pitfalls in this effort.