Performance Testing Introduction: Although, work around a software product starts from ideation, it doesn’t necessarily end at development; there is more to it. Even before it reaches the market and makes itself available to users across borders, the software has to go through rigorous testing conducted on its various aspects to see how it performs. In the extremely cut-throat competitive world, if the newly developed software fails to perform to its optimum level, it will meet rejection at once. In the present fast paced life, users prefer software that makes life easier and quicker for them. In case, a software product fails to respond within fraction of seconds, it can be considered a performance issue and hence, will receive a toss. With so many software products competing against each other to gain prominence among users, one that doesn’t match up to today’s speed and causes delay in their response time will soon become obsolete. In order to ensure that your software doesn’t meet this fate, performance testing is very much essential. What is Performance Testing? Performance of a software accounts for its functionality, usability and scalability levels under real life stress situations. So, while testing, an effective methodology is to be adopted to predict system behavior and its performance when exposed to varying levels of catastrophe. Such situations often lead to failures and slowdowns, which have a crippling effect on the overall productivity of the software, resulting in the ensuing driving away of customers and ruining the brand name and value of the company. For instance, you release software into the market without conducting performance tests on it and this software fails to respond properly under stressful situations in real life. Users will soon get either annoyed or disappointed using it and will not only give up on using the software, but also spread the word that it is a product not worth using. Since, you are the owner of that software; your business earns a negative reputation in the market, which makes future users think twice before trying any software you roll out. To avoid all these negative scenarios, performance testing of software is necessary, to the point that it has now become unavoidable. Key Functions Involved in Performance Testing: When a software product is put to performance testing, the team responsible for conducting the entire test will identify and get in touch with vital business and technical contacts for that project to get a detailed know-how of the software and its architecture. Once that is clear, the testing team will focus on recognizing potential performance bottlenecks in the early stages of SDLC and chalk out areas that run risks. Based on their understanding, they will come up with an all-comprehensive performance testing strategy taking services, testing and automating scenarios, tools to be used, reporting protocols, and testing environments into its ambit. With this strategy in place, the performance testing team will generate scenarios and scripts to come up with quantifiable, reliable load and stress tests that can be easily repeated. Emulating user loads, production environment, business patterns and future growth predictions, these teams can execute load testing to check response time and resource utilization to detect issues. Analyzing the results, the teams can recommend performance tuning to speed up response times and evade bottlenecks of
resources. Even these can be followed up by creation of customized reports to suit particular projects and its interests for stakeholders and execution of trend analysis to spot problem areas related to scalability with possibilities of negative impact on the software in the future. Challenges in Performance Testing: Creating the appropriate infrastructure to simulate the end user environment happens to be one of the major challenges encountered by performance testers. The challenge becomes more severe when the simulated environment has to be created at short notice, enabling it to scale up and down easily. In an effort to achieve a high end infrastructure, often the resultant process becomes timeconsuming and expensive. This can be easily handled by integrating performance testing framework with cloud. Leveraging the cloud, performance test scenarios can be dealt with successfully. Performance Testing Tools: Some of the most popular performance testing tools include: HP Load Runner Microfocus Silk Performer IBM Rational Robot and Quantify Compurware QA Load JMeter + QAIT IP on Jmeter
With these tools, supporting frameworks and cloud computing technologies, the performance testing team can create realistic load simulations to work in all operating systems and browsers. This enables a wider test coverage area at considerably lower costs. Performance Testing Differentiators:
Attaining the perfect blend for performance testing can be tricky. However, here are some differentiators that can provide effective solutions to such testing. Say a team of experienced performance engineers who boast of a little bit of knowledge and practice of product development, capacity management and years of testing/tuning performance of software products can handle such testing efforts easily. Similarly, having cloud based test labs that allow flexibility and scalability management, are of great help to a team as well. These labs allow you to simulate traffic akin to different geographies of the real world, involving minimum costs. On the other hand, developing internal frameworks based on open source tools such as JMeter can help in reporting and monitoring performance testing of a system effectively. Using such open source or licensed performance engineering tools, a testing team can ensure end to end performance engineering experience for you.