Performance Engineering Checklists

Checklists; something that I truly believe in having for everything. Right from list of things to check before leaving home for office, to list of things to check when debugging a Performance issue. There should be a check list for everything.

With checklist, you will not only avoid accidentally missing something important, but you will also end up standardizing things. Most of the Performance engineering related activities are repeated over a period of time, and checklists will set best practices within the team.

Below are a few of the checklists that I follow as a Performance Engineer. (some I have followed in my previous organizations, and some I am following now.)

1. For build deployment?

2. For parameters to monitor during the test

3. For metrics to collect after the test

4. For details to include in Results Page

5. For areas to look in to when debugging a production issue

Different types of production issues involve different types of approach. I mainly follow Brendan Gregg's checklist (60secs checklist) to check the area of the actual issue in production. Link here.

Lastly, I use Trello for maintaining all my checklists, but confluence, evernote, onenote also have great checklist features.

What checklists do you follow to standardize procedures ?