4 Things to Consider Before Conducting Performance Testing
For IT organizations, a fully functional software product is the mirror image of your reputation. That’s why 87% of companies consider software testing as a crucial part of their development lifecycle. Testing is a must-to-do process to ensure the quality of your software product. The process is broadly categorized as functional and non-functional testing. Let’s begin by discussing what is “Performance Testing” and what things we need to consider before performing this specific test.
What is Performance Testing?
Performance testing is one of the software testing types that focuses on thoroughly verifying a software application’s stability, speed, and responsiveness. It’s a crucial test because fine-tuning the app’s performance can enhance traffic retention. Performance testing can encompass a wide range of testing types under its domain. Few of them are -
- Load testing: provides a general notion of an application’s behavior, latency, and throughput under normal conditions.
- Stress testing: In stress testing, the system is subjected to more than the predicted workload to ensure its reliability.
- Scalability testing: gives an approximate sense of the software’s potential scalability factor for future reference by gradually expanding the number of users, data, and transactions.
- Spike testing: It analyzes how the system will function under sudden traffic spikes.
- Soak testing: a type of elongated load testing in which the application is examined for long-term consequences such as memory leaks, storage issues, and so on. Soak testing might range anything from a few minutes to several hours.
In order to have the best results with performance testing, it is recommended for the QA teams to follow a set checklist. Brief detail about a few of them are given below -
Performance testing checklist
Identify Load testing objective
It should be your duty to test the application’s performance during its peak load time. QA testers mimic a peak load time and collect performance testing measurements to examine the software’s performance in order to test this.
Even during peak periods, testing heavy loads is not based on expected load instances. Heavy load testing, on the other hand, examines how the software program maintains stability when it is suddenly bombarded with a large number of requests.
Determine which application requires performance testing
To determine which application requires performance testing one need to ask a question like
- Whether the application is web-based, desktop application or mobile application
- Which operating system is being used by your application?
- Which environments are available for testing?
A well-defined test plan can help avoid delays and identify problems before they occur. Answers to the following critical questions should be included in your web application performance testing checklist:
- Are the API scenarios’ priorities defined?
- Is it possible to include all positive and negative test scenarios?
- How will test scenarios be distributed among your QA team?
Identify special software plugins
During your performance testing procedure, you’ll need a test plan that focuses on how to test the special program or plug-in. They may need support from outside sources, such as reading manuals and writing guidelines or speaking with software testing experts.
Is the application have any software plugins installed? Is the application using “flash player” or “java swing objects?” Questions like this needed to be asked in order to find out if your application has any special software or plug-ins involved.
Identify testing KPIs
Performance testing metrics are there to guide your QA throughout the whole process. You need to choose your key performance indicators wisely as the KPIs are designed to monitor application servers, response times, database server metrics, and system behavior. A few of the recommended KPIs for performance testings are -
Response Time — How long does it take to send and receive a request?
Wait Time — What is the waiting time for receiving the first byte after the request is sent?
Peak Response Time — What’s the longest time taken to fulfill a request?
Error Rate — What percentage of requests result in error comparison?
CPU Utilization — How long does it take the CPU to process requests?
Conclusion
We all can agree on the fact that — testing is an integral part of the software development process. Of all the different types of testing, performance testing plays a vital role in the testing procedure as it tests the limits of the application. As the application is subjected to maximum possible loads during performance tests, it is crucial for the tester to prepare a checklist before performing the actual test. Do you have any other pointers you would like to add? Let us know in the comments below.