To measure the success of the Faster Local Testing project, we should, before making any changes, measure the execution times of the startup, shutdown, and initiation phases of ReplSetTest and ShardingTest across all tests in the replica_sets and sharding suites. We should record the durations of the relevant sections of code for each test so that we can run this experiment again after the project is complete to see how the performance improved for each relevant section i.e. ReplSetTest.startSet, ShardingTest.stop, etc.