A Complete Guide to Performance Testing

If you think about performance testing, it feels like a necessary part of a development cycle, right? But what if we tell you there are millions of companies in the development business and they still can’t care less about performance testing? It’s a fact, and companies don’t think about performance testing as a core part of their development cycle, it comes later.

Today we will be looking at the importance of performance testing. We will guide you through steps that are important in performance testing.

What Is Performance Testing In The Modern World?

Performance testing is the concept of gathering all the information related to tests to check the application’s speed, robustness, reliability, and correct size. The primary purpose of the testing is to find functional defects that are present in the application. The process is used to eliminate performance bottlenecks, which could slow down the app and affect its processing.

Different Types Of Performance Testing

Load Testing: It is used to understand the system’s behavior when a program has been loaded into it. This type of testing is preferred in the areas where business-critical transactions and loads on the database are measured.

Stress Testing: When we are trying to find the upper limit of the system that we have. And check how good a system can perform when overloading it from its expected maximum capacity.

Endurance Testing: It is the same as the endurance race that you see on sports TV. But here, the only difference is that we are testing the system’s endurance by putting them on a high workload for long periods. This is done to see whether there is any issue during continuous usage. This type of testing is also termed as soak testing.

Spike Testing: In spike testing, we increase the number of users in a system all of a sudden and then check how the system can handle it. The spike testing’s main aim is to check if the system can control the sudden increase of workload and still sustain its performance.

The Seven Performance Testing Steps

Given below are the seven steps which you need to follow as they are written to execute performance testing of your system successfully.

• Identify The Testing Environment:- First, check your hardware, software, network, and tools requirements and make sure they are present. See if there is anything else the testing team needs to design and perform the test. Also, try to look for the first performance test challenges. As a result, all these initial steps will help in creating more efficient tests. They will make things easier for the tester to counter the issues they might face during the testing.

• Identity Performance Metrics:- You need to set the goals for your test and constraints for throughput and the machine’s minimum response time and the time it should take for the resource allocation. You need to identify the success areas of your project outside the constraints that you have set up.
• An excellent way to set up performance goals is by possibly finding a similar application and seeing its test results. Testers need to set up their performance criteria and goals because project description and speculation does not provide a wide variety of performance benchmarks.
• Design & Plan Performance Tests:- Once the goals are set up, you have identified all the necessary factors to make a suitable testing environment for your system. You need to plan out the test scenarios based on the goals you have chosen. It would be best to determine how amongst the different users and case scenarios, the user will be divided. It is required that you use various simulation and test cases when performing stress tests on the system. Plan out the performance data and outline which metrics need to be reported.
• Configure The Testing Environment:- Now your setup is almost complete. What remains is configuring the testing environment to execute your tests and arranging the necessary tools along with the essential resources.
• Begin Implementing Your Test Designs:- Here you need to create the performance test in your system according to the plan. And the design which you have made and prepare your system for the tests.
• Execute The Tests:- Begin the execution of the test and start monitoring the performance dips of your system.
• Analyze, Tune, And Then Retest:- Once the tests are over, consolidate the test reports and share the result with the team. After that, start fine-tuning your system and rerun the tests. To check if there is any improvement in the performance after the tuning is done.

Do the retests until the improvement ratio is minimal, and you are facing a bottleneck from the CPU power. Here increase the CPU power if needed and then restart the system.

Conclusion

These are seven steps of performing a complete performance test on your system. It might look like a small process at the start. But as you fine-tune your system, you will find out how much power and work efficiency, you can make your system just by little tweaks.

In software engineering, performance testing is vital to optimizing a program before releasing it in the market. It will help you in retaining customer satisfaction, along with loyalty.

• « Why QA is Crucial for Executing DevOps?
• How to Build a Progressive Web App (PWA) Using React Native? »