Performance testing is a testing technique, which helps to determine how the stability, scalability, responsiveness, and speed of an application hold up under a given workload. It is a non-functional testing technique. Even though it is important for ensuring software quality, it is often undertaken when the code is ready for release. Typically, speed, robustness, reliability, and application size are examined when a performance test is executed. Understanding the importance of performance testing is crucial in ensuring the overall quality and reliability of software applications.
Table of Contents:
- What is the Importance of Performance Testing?
- What are the Business Benefits of Performance Testing?
- What does Performance Testing Measure?
- Process of Performance Testing
- Tips for Effective Performance Testing
- Conclusion
The process incorporates performance indicators such as:
- Response times of page, browser, and network
- Processing time is taken by a server request and query
- The number of acceptable concurrent users
- CPU memory consumption
- The number and type of errors that might be encountered with an application
Let’s throw some light on why performance testing is important.
What is the Importance of Performance Testing?
To ensure that the system will meet the expected service levels in production as well as to render a positive user experience, it is critical to fulfill the need of performance testing. Also, to avoid the cost of solving a problem in production performance that can be prohibitive, a continuous or an ongoing performance testing strategy is advisable. More specifically, performance testing is important:
- To verify if the application satisfies performance requirements( for example, the system needs to manage up to 500 or 800 concurrent users)
- To check for computing bottlenecks in an application
- To compare systems in order to identify the better system of the lot
- To measure stability under peak internet traffic events
These are some key reasons why performance testing is required.
What are the Business Benefits of Performance Testing?
Software performance testing provides several benefits to businesses. Here are some of the key ones:
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Improved User Experience
The performance of an application plays an important role in determining the user experience. Slow, unresponsive, or unreliable applications can lead to a poor user experience and damage the business’s reputation. Performance testing helps to identify bottlenecks, fix issues and improve the overall application performance, leading to a better user experience.
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Increased Productivity
Performance testing helps identify and eliminate performance-related issues early in the development cycle, which reduces the time and cost of fixing them later. This allows developers to focus on other critical tasks, increasing productivity.
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Cost Savings
Performance testing helps identify performance issues before the application is deployed, which reduces the risk of application failures and downtime. This translates to business cost savings. They don’t have to spend money on emergency repairs, lost revenue due to downtime, or potential legal fees and fines resulting from data breaches.
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Competitive Advantage
Applications that perform well and provide an excellent user experience can provide a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace. Customers are more likely to choose and stick with reliable and responsive applications, giving businesses that invest in performance testing an edge over their competitors.
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Improved Scalability
Performance testing helps to identify how well an application can handle a growing number of users, transactions, and data volumes. Doing so enables businesses to plan and implement scalability measures early, avoiding unexpected failures and ensuring that the application can handle growing demand.
Overall, understanding the importance of performance testing is a crucial step in ensuring the success of software applications and helps businesses deliver high-quality, reliable, and scalable solutions to their customers.
What does Performance Testing Measure?
Typically, there are many performance testing benefits as it can be used to measure and analyze response times and potential errors, besides other factors. This helps to clearly identify bugs, bottlenecks, and mistakes –and guides you to optimize the application, eliminating the problem(s).
The issues highlighted by performance tests are related to response times, speed, load times, and scalability.
- Load time: The allotment needed to start an application is the load time. The time taken should be as minimum as a few seconds for an ideal user experience.
- Response time: The time taken to respond to a user’s query or request is called the response time. A delayed response time will lead to a bad user experience.
- Scalability: If there is a problem with the adaptability of the application, being unable to accommodate different numbers of users, it means that the scalability is limited.
- Bottlenecks: Typically, hardware issues or poor coding gives rise to the obstruction that hinders the overall performance of the system. These are bottlenecks.
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The Process of Performance Testing
The goal is to make sure that the system performs well under different circumstances. This is possible by way of performance testing. To achieve this, there is a broad, generic framework that is followed in performance testing:
- Identify the testing environment and tools: A thorough knowledge of the hardware, software and network configurations that is being used and documenting them in both test and production environments ensures coherence and helps to identify problems that testers might encounter.
- Define acceptable performance criteria: Before starting off with the tests, the goals and the thresholds that will demonstrate success should be determined. While the project specifications will provide the main criteria, testers also need to set a wider set of tests and goals.
- Define planning test scenarios and design tests: It is critical to determine and understand how different types of users would be using the application. It is best to follow this by creating test scenarios that accommodate different yet feasible use cases that emulate real life conditions that involve:
- Preparing and setting up the testing environment and tools
- Implementing the test design
- Running the test and monitoring them
- Analysing, adjusting and redoing the tests
After running the tests, the results should be analysed and consolidated. As soon as the issues are resolved, tests are to be repeated to make sure that other issues are eliminated as well. It emphasizes the importance of performance testing ensuring a robust and optimised system.
Tips for Effective Performance Testing
An ideal testing environment would be one that mirrors the production ecosystem as closely as possible. Here are some tips for effective performance testing to achieve accurate results:
- Keep the performance testing environment separate from the UAT environment.
- Identify and work with those test tools that best automate the performance testing plans.
- Run the same test multiple times to determine the consistency of the outcome before checking off the performance as acceptable or not.
- Avoid changing the testing environment between tests.
Conclusion
Performance Testing is concerned with measuring the current performance of an application or a system under varying workloads. At Hurix, we go beyond traditional performance testing and conduct fully automated performance testing. We have automated testing tools that can be used to execute performance tests efficiently.
