This IBM® Redbooks® publication is intended to show customers how Rational processes and products support and enable effective systems testing.

The book describes how performance testing fits into the overall process of building enterprise information systems. We discuss the value of performance testing and its benefits in ensuring the availability, robustness, and responsiveness of your information systems that fill critical roles for your enterprise.

Based on years of project experience, we describe the key requirements needed in performance testing tools and how the IBM Rational Performance Tester tool was developed to meet those requirements. We also walk through the choices that we made to steer the tool architecture into using an open source platform as its base with Java as its language to permit ubiquitous platform support.

This book is structured into two parts:

Understanding Rational Performance Tester

Applying Rational Performance Tester to enterprise application testing

Part 1. Understanding Rational Performance Tester

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. Performance testing process

Chapter 3. Recording and test generation

Chapter 4. Test editing and augmentation

Chapter 5. Test playback and debugging

Chapter 6. Scheduling tests

Chapter 7. Results analysis and reporting

Chapter 8. Resource monitoring

Chapter 9. Application monitoring

Part 2. Applying RPT to enterprise application testing

Chapter 10. Scalability and test agents

Chapter 11. Testing SAP enterprise applications

Chapter 12. Testing Citrix application environments

Chapter 13. Testing with custom Java code

Chapter 14. Smart Bank: An example of dynamic workload implementation with RTP

Appendix A. Installation and licensing