Teaching About the Impact of Transaction Volume on System Performance and Capacity Planning

Courses in information resource management often include discussion and practice in capacity planning. This requires students to understand a variety of topics related to business transaction processing, workload characteristics, system demand, forecasting methods, and system performance measurement. This article presents a student project that combines these topics in a spreadsheet application. The spreadsheet is designed to take transaction history as input, use this history to make forecasts of future workload demand, and then predict future system performance based on these forecasts. The paper discusses forecasting methods, system performance metrics, and presents a comprehensive description of the spreadsheet assignment.