Software Performance Testing: All You Need To Know

• What Is Performance Testing?
• Performance Testing Benefits
• Software Performance Testing Types
• Performance Testing Metrics
• Performance Testing Process
• Top Software Performance Testing Tools

It helps to test the stability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness of the software. It helps examine several indicators such as:

• Measure Significant Attributes: Speed, accuracy, and stability are the most important parameters of software usability. Performance testing provides the answer to the following questions;
  1. Speed: Is the developed app quick enough to respond to the potential end-user?
  2. Stability: Is the application stable under varying & heavy concurrent user load?
  3. Accuracy: Is the application delivering the desired results?
• Ensures Improved Customer Satisfaction: Most users expect mobile-based and web-based apps to load within 2 seconds with no sort of buffering. The first impression of your software is important in deciding whether users will want to continue using it or exit the application and hit the uninstall button. In-depth testing helps you meet the expectations of your customers.
• Identify Discrepancies and Eliminates Major Issues: The methodology of performance testing helps identify key issues that developers can correct before launching your mobile app or website. This will help to avoid scenarios of software failure and effectively enhance the scope of the application as the errors are resolved in the nick of time!
• Improves Optimization Capability: Another benefit is its ability to increase the load capacity and enhance optimization. This helps your software withstand & perform at peak efficiency even when it’s hit with a huge number of concurrent users.

Load Testing

• Determines system performance with the increase in workload in a given time. This can be in form of transactions, concurrent users, software behavior, and more.
• In replicating realistic usage and high load conditions, based on response times, this test can help detect potential performance bottlenecks.

Stress Testing

• Identifies the breakpoint of the software or an application.
• Measures the software stability by applying a higher-than-expected workload to learn at what point the system fails, and how it recovers from failure.

Spike Testing

• A subset of stress testing determining the behavior of a software application when it is impacted by drastic variations in traffic.
• Helps evaluate the system’s capability to handle a sudden and extreme increase or decrease in load over a short period of time, repeatedly.

Volume Testing

• Checks system performance by executing various data-intensive transactions and examines how efficiently the system behaves with varying database volumes.
• It checks for system response time, data loss, data storage reliability, and more.

Metrics are a baseline for any test. By monitoring the appropriate factors, it will help you analyze and track areas that need more attention with practical solutions for improvisation. Some common factors include:

• Throughput: Evaluates the number of units a system can process over a specified time.
• Memory: Measures working storage space available from a processor to function
• Response time: Helps indicate the time taken at which the response was received for the sent request.
• Bandwidth: Calculates data (bits per second) used by a network interface.
• CPU interrupts per second: Measures number of hardware interrupts per second

Step 1: Identify the Test Environment:

• It involves choosing a test environment as well as performance testing tools.
• A tester must consider the necessary details of the hardware, software, and other network configurations before beginning the testing process.

Step 2: Determine Performance Criteria:

It is vital to finalize goals and constraints of performance acceptance metrics, including throughput, response time, load time, transactions, resource allocation, and more.

Step 3: Plan and Design:

Software testers identify various test scenarios considering end-user variability and plan out some data to conduct performance testing.  All such details are included in the test plan.

Step 4: Configure Test Environment:

Prepare the test environment on which the testing is to be performed before execution. Also, it includes an arrangement of resources and tools.

Step 5: Implement Test Design

Create performance tests according to your test design.

Step 6: Test Execution:

In this step, the tests are executed, and their performance gets monitored for further optimization.

Step 7: Analyze, Adjust and Retest:

This is the last step where the results are analyzed. Based on the analysis, the developed software is fine-tuned and retested again to check whether it requires further improvements.

Further, if you wish to understand how we help businesses choose a performance engineering-driven culture, do give this blog a read.

JMeter

Written in Java, it is one of the most popular open-source tools used for running load tests. JMeter helps analyze and measure the performance of a range of web and web service applications.

WebLoad

An enterprise-grade load testing tool used for generating reliable test use cases scenarios for mobile and web testing. It is capable of simulating thousands of concurrent users. This makes it ideal for testing heavy traffic loads and detect weak points, constraints, and performance bottlenecks in the developed app.

Load Runner

It is the most widely used load testing tool designed by Micro Focus. LoadRunner is used to test applications, verifying the application performance, and functionality. It enables software testers to have complete visibility over the software’s end-to-end performance.