Baselines

A Baseline is the process of capturing performance metric data for the sole purpose of evaluating the efficacy of successive changes to the system or application. It is important that all characteristics and configurations, except those specifically being varied for comparison, remain the same in order to make effective comparisons as to which change (or series of changes) is driving results toward the targeted goal. Armed with such baseline results, subsequent changes can be made to the system configuration or application and testing results can be compared to see whether such changes were relevant or not. Some considerations when generating baselines include the following:

• They are application-specific
• They can be created for systems, applications, or modules
• They are metrics/results
• They should not be over generalized
• They evolve and may need to be redefined from time to time
• They act as a shared frame of reference
• They are reusable
• They help identify changes in performance