The Ultimate Guide to Software Performance Testing

Any software application is judged by customers/users based on its user experience and how optimal it is in terms of performance. Even a minute issue with an application’s performance can prove to be troublesome. Hence, the inclusion of performance testing is required. Performance testing ensures that an application will perform as expected under varying or specific workloads. In this article, you will get a detailed overview of performance testing.

What is performance testing?

It is a testing method that is performed to ascertain the stability, scalability, response time and testing speed of a software application under a specific or varying workload. The quality attributes of a system such as a resource usage, reliability and scalability are measured by this testing method.

The performance bottlenecks in a software application are identified and eliminated through the strategic implementation of performance testing. It is also known as “perf testing” and is considered to be a subset of performance engineering.

The need to conduct performance testing:

It provides detailed information about the scalability, stability and speed of the software application. What needs to be improved is uncovered in order to mitigate issues such as poor usability, inconsistencies across different operating systems and slow performance.

Following are some of the factors that affect the performance of a software application:

1. Traffic spike: Sudden spike in traffic can slow down the performance of the application if the data is not being managed properly. Similarly, load distributions that are incorrectly implemented can also cause such spikes in traffic.

2. The quality of code: Incorrect code optimization, memory leaks, inefficient algorithms are some of the issues pertaining to code quality. In data-centric applications, the choice of incorrect schema design and database can cause performance related issues.

3. Network issues: Making queries to non-existent DNS servers, firewall inefficiency, network issues etc., are some examples that create network related performance issues.

Following are seven steps that are required to perform performance testing:

1. Develop a testing environment: Identify the production environment, physical test environment and the relevant performance testing tools. Understand in detail about the network configurations, software and hardware that will be used during the performance testing process. Through this, more efficient tests can be created by the testers. Possible challenges may also be identified by testers during the conduction of the performance testing process.

2. The performance acceptance criteria must be analysed: This includes constraints and goals for throughput, resource allocation and response times. The project success criteria should also be identified outside of these constraints and goals. Performance criteria should be meticulously developed by the testing team because there will be instances where the project specifications document might not include the performance benchmarks that need to be scrutinized. Hence, to avoid such scenarios, performance goals can be tactically developed by the testing team.

3. Initiate the designing of performance tests: The key performance test scenarios should be identified and the target metrics, test data and variability should be taken into consideration.

4. Configuration: Before the execution phase begins for the testing environment, prepare the necessary instruments and elements needed for monitoring resources.

5. Test design implementation: The performance tests should be created based on the test design and then implement it strategically.

6. Test execution: The performance tests should be executed and then properly monitored in order to capture the data that has been generated.

7. Analyze the results: Analyze, consolidate and prepare a report on test results. Based on the findings, re-run the tests using different or same parameters and then analyze the performance.

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing performance testing for your specific software development project, then do get connected with a leading automation companies UK that will provide you a tactical testing solution in line with your project requirements.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.