Thoughts About Think Time

Posted on 5/4/2006 at 08:51

My first blog and what to write about... think... think... think... how about Think Time??

We all know the importance of Think Time to Performance Testing, and I'm not going to go into that.  Think of this as one piece of the puzzle, and one that might ease the pain a bit.

I find that often, as we discuss this with project teams and business users (and I do my passionate speach about the importance of think times to the accuracy of modeling actual user behavior), a frequent reaction is "We have to time every thing we do and tell you how long it takes us?  Every thing we type in, too??  All of it?".  An approach I've taken to try and relieve some of the burden is to come up with some standards for common activities such as navigating a series of links or menu choices, performing data entry into different types and sizes of field on a form, viewing the results of a standard search (item number, part number, customer name) to choose the desired record, and so forth.

This is not meant to replace gathering accurate think times, but is meant to be used for some of the routine activities that are not impacted by something special happening by the user (i.e. interraction with a customer on the phone, cross checking a value in another system or report).  This is only a handy way of supplying think times for basic tasks.

This may vary on a project to project basis, but define some of these common activities, and assign them a value in seconds.  It may help to define some of this up front, and then present it to the project team as a starting point to build from.  As you work through the business process, you may find additional opportunities to standardize and to identify activities that fall into these categories.  Give each of the categories names, and use them when working with the customer.  So, if you were a fly on the wall during a walk through of a business process, you might hear something like; "The user will click the ChooseItem link - and here we'll use our LinkThinkTime, right?  Then they will enter the Item Description in the search box, and this is a 30 character text value and doesn't allow wildcards, so we can use our MediumTextBoxThinkTime, right?  Then they have some special business they have to perform, so we can't use any of our predefined times.  Let's talk about this field...".

Take the names and the values and create global variables for your scripts.  Replace the recorded think times for these transactions with the appropriate variable!  Don't forget to update the non-standard think times, as well.  As always, think about varying the think times during the execution.  But you'd do that anyway, right?

Comments and discussion is welcome!!