Identifying Application Performance Requirements › Establishing Performance Requirements for Transactions

Establishing Performance Requirements for Transactions

Employees depend on fast computer turnaround to accomplish their day-to-day work. To ensure satisfactory turnaround time, you should establish performance requirements for the system.

Since company personnel have varying information requirements, you need to define separate performance requirements for each transaction. While some transactions perform high-volume, routine processing, such as payroll, inventory, and budgets, others enable end users to make ad hoc requests for information.

Company personnel measure the efficiency of a transaction by the amount of work it can perform and the amount of time it requires to perform the work. If you help employees to define realistic expectations of transaction performance, you can set performance requirements for the system that will be acceptable to the user community.

Processing modes

For each transaction, select a mode of computer processing that meets the needs of users without degrading system performance. For example, you might decide to execute a high-volume processing task as a batch job, while allowing end users to make ad hoc requests for data through an online application.

Once the processing mode has been established, define appropriate performance requirements for the transaction. Your requirements will vary depending on the mode of processing: while a 12-hour turnaround time might be acceptable for a large batch program, a 5-minute response time will be unsatisfactory for an online application.

Sample Transactions

The following table shows performance requirements for three sample transactions at the Commonweather Corporation.

Considerations

Your requirements should take into consideration the resources available with the computer system. If the resources are not adequate to meet the established performance requirements, you will need to modify the expectations of the user community or acquire additional resources.