A general purpose application performance test harness

A commonly overlooked aspect of software testing is determining the best performing solution to a problem. Many possible implementations may produce the correct result but may not be the fastest. Even the variations of individual functions or routines can significantly impact the performance of the entire system. Slow and cumbersome applications can frustrate users and be costly. The work of this thesis is the design and construction of a test harness to assist developers with the task of performance testing their applications. A fully featured and a proof of concept implementation test harness are described. The test harness is divided in to components which implement generic data processing techniques to abstract the control logic away from the specific test cases. A new scripting language is included for developers to define the required test cases for their application. The new scripting language generates the full set of test cases from generic command templates and defined variable sets. The implemented test harness is tested using three example problems to demonstrate the usage and capabilities of the test harness. The results of these example problems are discussed. Finally, suggestions of future work is included for test harness enhancements.