Performance testing is an intrinsic part of the whole testing
process which involves testing the applications with varied amount of load, stress
and strategic performance related parameters. In addition to the current
expected load, applications also need to be future proof to handle organic load
scalability driven by greater product adoption.
An application crash not only causes significant revenue loss but
also increases the chances of loss of credibility and trust. This it becomes
imperative for all software applications to be tested for scalability and increased
resource usage in the future. Let us take a look at performance testing process
which ensures your application runs seamlessly at varied loads and even stays
afloat in case of sudden traffic spikes.
There are news items every holiday & festive season that e-commerce
sites have crashed when more than expected number of visitors turn up to the
portal. The most common response is site loads forever. Performance testing
helps predict and prevent bottlenecks to ensure applications run as expected
under load. For online applications it becomes even more important as it
affects the search engine rankings as well as while the users abandon the site due
to late responses.
Performance testing comprises of various subsets like Stress
testing, Load testing,
Volume testing, Spike Testing and Scalability testing. The motive
of all these testing practices is to make sure that your system performs as per
the user expectations and gives him an experience which is trouble free.
Validation of the software’s performance under varied load conditions and
putting it artificially under pressure gives the developers many loop holes on
which they can work and improve the performance. Memory leakage is one of the
common performance related issues which gets detected in performance testing.
Scalability of system is also very important along with speed as it judges the
performance of the system for future test cases and for some spike situations
when the traffic might rise suddenly.
A Performance testing process comprises of designing and
configuring the test cases in such a way that they try to subject the system by
varying various load parameters. All this is accomplished using Performance
testing automation tools. Most common performance related issues are related to
Response time, Load time, Hardware utilisation of HDD & CPU, Network delay
and Software configurations. Such issues are commonly identified by the
software testers and reported.
Various automated performance testing tools are used to ease the
task of testers who need to create the virtual environment to execute test
cases to test the system. These testing tools put the software application
under continuous and random stress, load to bring the best out of it and
measure the response time and overall performance of the system. A test plan
including the performance test process is a must and should comprise of the choice
of right test tool to execute variety of test cases. Analysing the test results,
fine tuning the application and then retesting the application removes the
performance bottlenecks and makes it a user friendly
application.
Performance testing is a major part of UI experience and should
not be ignored as it
can have wide ranging impact on the business operations and sales.
It should be a major part of any software development process as it is directly
related to the end user experience and a failed application can impact the
customer’s perception of the brand.
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