What is the outline of test plan? What are test specification items?

There is an outline that should be followed while writing a test plan. It consists of the following:
- The Background
- The Introduction
- The Assumptions
- The Test Items to be tested.
- The Features to be tested.
- The Features not to be tested.
- The Approach that is to be followed.
- Item Pass/Fail Criteria which is an itemized list of expected output and tolerances.
- The Suspension or Resumption Criteria.
- Test Deliverable which includes beside software, what else would be delivered?
- Testing Tasks which consists of functional and administrative tasks.
- Environmental needs like security clearance, office space and equipment, hardware and software requirements.
- Responsibilities.
- Staffing and Training
- Schedule
- Resources
- Risks and Contingencies
- Approvals

Test specifications are developed from test plan and are a part of second phase of test development life cycle. How to implement the test cases is explained through test specifications. It consists of following:
- Case Number
- Title of Test
- ProgName which consists of program name containing test.
- Author
- Date
- Background which consists of Objectives, Assumptions, References, Success Criteria.
- Expected Errors
- References
- Data that flows between the implementation under test and test engine.
- Script

What is the need to execute Network Sensitivity Tests?

The three principle reasons for executing network sensitivity tests are as follows:
- Determine the impact on response time of WAN link.
- Determine the capacity of a system based on a given WAN link.
- Determine the impact on the system under test that is under dirty communications load.
Execution of performance and load tests for analysis of network sensitivity require test system configuration to emulate a WAN. Once a WAN link has been configured, performance and load tests conducted will become Network Sensitivity Tests.

There are two ways of configuring such tests:
- Use a simulated WAN and inject appropriate background traffic
This can be achieved by putting back to back routers between a load generator and the system under test. The routers can be configured to allow the required level of bandwidth, and instead of connecting to a real WAN, they connect directly through to each other.
When back to back routers are configured to be part of a test, they will basically limit the bandwidth. If the test is to be realistic, then additional traffic will need to be applied to the routers. This can be achieved by a web server at one end of the link serving pages and another load generator generating
requests. It is important that the mix of traffic is realistic.

For example, a few continuous file transfers may impact response time in a different way to a large number of small transmissions. By forcing extra more traffic over the simulated WAN link, the latency will increase and some packet loss may even occur. While this is much more realistic than testing over a high speed LAN, it does not take into account many features of a congested WAN such as out of sequence packets.

- Use the WAN emulation facility within LoadRunner
The WAN emulation facility within LoadRunner supports a variety of WAN scenarios. Each load generator can be assigned a number of WAN emulation parameters, such as error rates and latency. WAN parameters can be set individually, or WAN link types can be selected from a list of pre-set configurations.

It is important to ensure that measured response times incorporate the impact of WAN effects both at an individual session, as part of a performance test, and under load as part of a load test, because a system under WAN affected load may work much harder than a system doing the same actions over a clean communications link.

How to execute Performance Tests?

Performance testing involves executing the same test case multiple times with data variations for each execution, and then collating response times and computing response time statistics to compare against the formal expectations. Often, performance is different when the data used in the test case is different, as different number of rows are processed in the database, different processing and validation come into play, and so on. By executing a test case many times with different data, a statistical measure of response time can be computed that can be directly compared against a formal stated expectation.

Network sensitivity tests are variations on load tests and performance tests that focus on the Wide Area Network (WAN) limitations and network activity. Network sensitivity tests can be used to predict the impact of a given WAN segment or traffic profile on various applications that are bandwidth dependent. Network issues often arise at low levels of concurrency over low bandwidth WAN segments. Very chatty applications can appear to be more prone to response time degradation under certain conditions than other applications that actually use more bandwidth. For example, some applications may degrade to unacceptable levels of response time when a certain pattern of network traffic uses 50% of available bandwidth, while other applications are virtually un-changed in response time even with 85% of available bandwidth consumed elsewhere.

This is particularly important test for deployment of a time critical application over a WAN. Also, some front end systems such as web servers, need to work much harder with dirty communications compared with clean communications encountered on a high speed LAN in an isolated load and performance testing environment.