Performance Testing
Performance testing checks if your system can withstand the overload, to define its maximum load and reveal possible bottlenecks.
Service Lead Message
Olga
Mashuto
Senior Test Automation Manager
The goal of performance testing is to evaluate performance indicators: response time, resource use, stability, and scalability.
Olga
Mashuto
Senior Test Automation Manager
This type of testing allows minimizing failure and downtime risks, which can lead to serious financial losses. Such losses can be direct (when the service is unavailable to users), reputational (users opt out of service because of system drawbacks), or both. In the case of violated data integrity, total losses can be drastic.
Overview
Features and functionality are not the only concerns in software quality assurance. While functional testing is designed to ensure that all business functions work flawlessly, performance testing assists in checking app potential under the conditions close to the app’s actual use.
Performance testing focuses on evaluating the response time under load, overall stability under stress conditions, application recovery in case of failures and saving the information as designed.
Performance Testing Types
Performance testing determines and validates characteristics of the system or application under test, including speed, scalability, and/or stability.
Load Testing
Identifies the maximum loads that an application can handle without significant functionality decrease and detects system bottlenecks under gradually increasing workloads.
Volume Testing
Assesses how much the system performance depends on the amount of data used in the system operation. Helps to find out, if the system can sustain the load in case of a substantial accumulated data increase.
Stress Testing
Verifies correct operation of the app under stress, for example, shortage of resources or excess calculated load level.
Recovery Disaster Failover Testing
Checks app behavior in case of unexpected failure of any of its modules. The backup systems are checked for availability, app response to failure, data accuracy, recovery time, and etc.
Reliability Testing
Long-lasting tests aimed at revealing possible performance decreases in the case of non-stop operation.
Scalability Testing
Analyzes app performance changes caused by hardware configuration adjustments, such as adding resources (CPU or memory) or adding nodes to the cluster.
Workflow
Performance testing includes the following stages:
App analysis
to determine the scope of work, typical scenarios and risks.
Work scheduling
to define risk management procedures, describe the project scope and the test bench requirements.
Design
to elaborate user scenarios in order to include them in testing, determine the profile (model) of the load, and the requirements for filling the database, and etc.
Implementation
to develop load testing scripts, database filling scripts, emulators of third-party systems, setting up monitoring, and debugging load tests.
Execution
to set up a test environment, run tests according to the test plan, analyze results and prepare reports.
Support
to eliminate problems identified after the project completion.
Tools & Technologies
When implementing performance testing, our company suggests using one of the following tools (however, we can consider using different ones as well):
Apache JMeter - is free and quite sufficient for most common tasks. This tool is less functional compared to the LoadRunner.
MicroFocus LoadRunner - this tool is probably the absolute leader in terms performance testing functionality. However, it is pretty expensive.
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