The Ultimate Guide to Software Performance Testing

Today, every enterprise wants quality software that performs well and provides a great user experience. Therefore, businesses conduct a variety of tests and one such test is the performance and load test that helps businesses to ensure that the software product works under all load conditions and gives a great experience to users. Let’s now look at this testing type in more detail.

What is performance testing?

It is a non-functional software testing type that is performed to determine how the system responds under varying load conditions. This test checks the responsiveness, speed, and stability of the software and ensures that software is free from all performance bottlenecks. This test ensures that the application performs as expected irrespective of the conditions like network fluctuations, bandwidth availability, or traffic load.

Why is performing testing needed?

Let us now try to understand why this type of testing is needed:

1. This test helps to remove bottlenecks from software, hardware, and network and test environment.

2. It ensures that the app can be used by customers all across the world conveniently under different speeds and network conditions across the globe

3. Today, customers want fast loading websites and applications, this test helps to improve the speed of apps and websites

4. This test helps businesses to ensure that the application performs the same way as it claims after the release

5. To ensure that the apps work well with the new technological update, this testing is needed

6. This test helps to determine the scalability, speed, and stability of the system if a load of concurrent users is suddenly increased

What are the different performance testing types?

Below mentioned are the different types of test that are performed to check how the system performs:

1. Load Testing: It is performed to check how the system performs under normal (usually around 70% of peak load) and peak user load conditions

2. Stress Testing: This test helps to identify the breaking point of the system when it is subjected to a user load beyond the expected peak. The breaking point can be defined as a load at which either the response time degrades beyond 10% or transactions start falling by more than 5%.

3. Endurance Testing: It checks the stability and responsiveness of the system when it is under significant load (around 70% of peak load) for a longer period (usually 8 hours to 72 hours).

4. Spike Testing: It is a subset of stress testing and checks the behaviour of the system by suddenly varying the no. of users. It checks if the system can handle the increased user load or not.

5. Volume Testing: In this testing, multiple data-intensive transactions are performed to validate how the system performs under such data volumes

6. Scalability Testing: This testing is done to identify the actual number of the users that the system can support with current hardware capacity

What are the benefits of performance testing?

1. Validates the functional features — This test helps to validate the functional features of the software which further helps the organization in improving the quality of the software

2. Improves the speed, scalability, and reliability -This test helps to measure, and improve the speed, scalability, and reliability of the software under varying conditions

3. Enhances customer satisfaction — It helps to eliminate bottlenecks and makes the software or product more reliable which in turn increases customer satisfaction

4. Helps in early defect identification — Helps to identify and resolve bugs in the software before the release and also reduces the chances of app failure

Conclusion: Once in a while you might have come across situations where the app suddenly stops working, or freezes, website time-out or images are not loaded correctly on the website, etc. These kinds of issues annoy customers and can revenue and reputation loss to the business. To ensure robust and high-performing software, businesses should leverage performance testing from a next-gen QA and software testing services provider.

About the author: I am a technical content writer and I write articles on various IT-related topics. In this article, I have tried to share an ultimate guide to software performance testing.