6.3 Performance efficiency measures

What this heading covers

The three families are related but not interchangeable. Time behaviour is about response and processing time under stated conditions. Resource utilization is about what the product consumes while doing the work. Capacity is about the limit it can carry before a property fails. A programme that reports only response time has measured one third of the characteristic. The conditions matter as much as the number: a response time without the load, the data volume and the environment is not reproducible, and the scope says target values depend on the product and its context.

Record position: characteristic 2 of 9, carrying 3 of the 40 measure families in clause 6.

What the heading asks of a team

The common confusion

Performance efficiency is often reduced to response time. The draft separates time, resource and capacity because a product can be fast, hungry and unable to scale, all at once.

The measure families in this characteristic

• 6.3.2 Time behaviour measures
• 6.3.3 Resource utilization measures
• 6.3.4 Capacity measures

What to put in place before publication

1. Write the load and environment profile for every performance test, and keep it with the result.
2. Name the resource dimensions the product is accountable for, and the instrument that measures each one.
3. Define what counts as failure at capacity, because the limit is only meaningful against that definition.
4. Decide how environmental sustainability will be reported, and label any measure of it as local.
5. Separate production measurement from test measurement in the report, since the environments differ.

Where teams usually fall short

• A single response time from a developer laptop, presented as the product's performance.
• Capacity quoted as a user count without the failure definition or the data volume.

What happens next

The time behaviour page is the one most buyers start with. Resource utilization and capacity are the two that explain why a product that felt fast in test falls over in operation.