In our digitally-connected world
where companies are churning out umpteen number of products or services to be
accessed over digital devices, performance becomes a sticky issue. The word
‘sticky’ has been used deliberately as the performance of a product or service
depends on a host of factors. And delivering a glitch-proof product is no
guarantee of its smooth performance. In fact, factors like responsiveness,
network bandwidth, and others can deal a body blow to the performance of an
application. Just think of an airlines portal catering to thousands of
transactions every second. If the portal does not follow a robust performance testing strategy and
selects a threshold for load, it is likely to crash midway or show latency.
This can adversely impact the user experience.
What is
performance testing?
It is a form of software testing
where the application under test needs to be checked for its load handling
capacity. The load performance testing
process determines the stability, speed, throughput, and responsiveness of an
application or system when working under a load. It is a non-functional testing
that comprises various tests such as load test, capacity test, scalability
test, soak/endurance test, volume test, and spike test.
To build the right performance testing strategy, one must
be aware of the associated challenges. These include
·
Testing the
software under realistic scenarios
·
Picking the
right tool to simulate real users
·
Lack of
test data
·
Limited
test coverage area
·
Poor
scalability not allowing the handling of concurrent tasks
·
Poor network
configuration
·
Insufficient
hardware resources like low performing CPUs
·
Insufficient
capacity to handle the workload
The performance testing methodology should define the scope, load
policy, and SLAs surrounding the application. Since everything about the
software cannot be tested, a decision should be taken to identify the specific
area, feature, or functionality of the application for testing. It has been
observed that around 10-15% of test scenarios contain around 75-90% of bugs.
So, it is better to focus on those scenarios and mitigate the lion’s share of
glitches.
How to build the right Application Performance Testing
strategy?
Selecting the right strategy
would determine if the performance of the application covers all the right
areas and load scenarios.
Test
environment: Set up a
robust test environment by identifying elements like hardware, network
configurations, and test tools. This will help the QA team to identify
challenges pertaining to performance testing early on in the SDLC. In fact, QA
experts can have a number of options in setting up the test environment. These
include:
·
A
production system containing a smaller number of servers of lower specification
·
A
production system comprising a smaller number of servers of similar specification
·
Using the
actual production system or its replica
Baseline
for user experience: At the
beginning of conducting load
performance testing, the QA testers should know the level of user
satisfaction. So, it is not merely about the number of load times or
responsiveness of the application. Identify a baseline for user experience that
the application should be tested for.
Performance
metrics: Choosing the right performance
metrics is important to plan for testing. These include throughput, response
time, and constraints. For example, response metrics deal with measuring the
performance of an application from a user’s perspective. While volume metrics
is about measuring traffic generated by the load testing tool vis-a-vis the
application.
Realistic
tests: Allowing umpteen number of
virtual users to face a server or cluster of servers may not be the right way
of measuring load in a real-world scenario. While setting up such a scenario,
the focus should be on choosing the devices or environments that would be used
to access the application in real-time. This is important because the traffic
is likely to come from a host of mobile devices, operating systems, and
browsers. Also, the realistic test scenario should vary the test environment.
This is to allow the organization to become resilient to the changing market
dynamics.
Performance
testing a part of Agile: Performance
testing should not be conducted at the end of the development process. This
makes it too late and expensive to fix glitches. So, load performance testing should be integrated with the development
process a la Agile. In fact, performance engineering
should be a part of the scrum and entrusted with measuring the performance of
code during development.
Conclusion
In a competitive business
environment where the quality of software application determines the latter’s
success, building the right strategy for performance testing is critical. It
ensures the smooth performance of application against a definitive user load scenario.
