The goal of performance testing is to load the system sufficiently so that we can be confident that we will not face any issues in production. This also goes hand-in-hand with monitoring; testing in a representative environment will give us an indication as to how the system will behave. We can then monitor the production environment for the same behaviors, and will be better placed to describe the patterns we see. Load testing should not be performed as a "success or fail" activity, but should be used to develop a deeper understanding of how user requests use up the resources available to the SOA Suite application. It is important that any monitoring performed on a testing system does not interfere with its performance, but we strongly advocate having comprehensive monitoring in your production environment. Replicating this monitoring in the test environment should be sufficient to give you all the metrics that you need.
When designing a set of tests, it is important to ensure...