Performance Testing in Agile Teams

When someone hears the words "Performance Testing", the most likely reactions are "Oh, that must be difficult", "I don't have the expertise", "It is going to take a lot of time", "I have no idea what to measure", "I need more tools".

But is that necessarily true?

Performance testing definitely requires expertise, but given the current speed of delivering new features, or even just trying to stay relevant in the market, while keeping customers happy, or scaling up quickly, it becomes very important.

There is so much tooling available nowadays that setting up performance test scripts or executing them is not the main challenge, but adopting the right performance testing strategies based on the organisational needs and resources makes all the difference.

Some organizations have their own performance engineering team to identify and improve performance bottlenecks. While some enterprises that have critical SLAs have performance considerations in-built together with delivering functionalities in Agile teams.

Let's hear it from one of the real voices in the Financial Services Industry. Someone who is an amazing person, and has gone miles in many areas of software testing. She is sharing her perspectives on the true pains and gains of learning on-the-job and ramping up performance testing efforts in multiple teams.

Phuong Le

About Her Career Journey:

I started as a Senior Automation QA 9 years ago with the current organization. I have thoroughly enjoyed every projects that I have worked on thus far. After few years, I had the opportunity to take on the role of Performance Test Lead.

Coming from Automation QA to leading performance testing was quite challenging for me, and most of my performance testing skills and knowledge have been learnt on-the-job. My role has been mainly to provide continuous guidance and helping other QAs to setup their performance test scenarios. I am now a QA Chapter Lead, leading a group of 8 eager-to-learn QAs.

What was your initial feelings towards the Performance Test Lead role?

I was a Performance Test Lead for about 4 years, I was asked to take this role even though I never had official training as a performance testing specialist. I was very excited to take on the challenge knowing that there would not be any formal training. It did not deter from doing the best I can in the role. My first challenge was to set up a Performance and Volume testing framework using open source tooling. I had the opportunity to work with a Lead Developer at that time and I learnt so much from him. His guidance and technical expertise were very valuable to my learning.

Why is there a trend with performance testing built into the Agile teams?

The need for In-built Quality with Fast Delivery Cycles

We all want to know how fast, how stable and how scalable the product we build under load. It will be too late to find out these information when your product is in used in production by real users, this can cause reputation damage to your organization. To prevent this, we should always think of performance testing, having this build into Agile can discover unexpected behavior early in our SDLC.

What aspects of performance testing excites you?

The most exciting part of performance testing for me is to narrow down what causes the slowness or bottleneck in performance and see how performance is improved after the fix is built.

What are some challenges you have faced when upskilling QAs for performance testing?

• lack of domain knowledge
• lack of technical skills
• lack of enthusiasm in performance testing

What are some drawbacks with having a separate performance testing unit instead of integrating them in the teams?

Having a separate performance testing team can be advantage and disadvantage.

The advantage is they will not know much about the product and can see it from different perspective.

And the disadvantage is if the product has to be built and functionally tested before it can be handed over to performance testing team, this will delay product delivery and this will cost more to have a fix if issue found. Also, as they might not have extensive domain knowledge about the product as the teams that built it, hence, there will be some areas that they could miss the focus to push the system under load.

How can organizations help QAs who want to put their hands up for performance testing??

Right tooling

We all know performance testing is time consuming, having the right tools will help a lot.

Training and guidance

Proper training will also benefit QAs hence benefit the company. For QAs who do not have any proper training or guidance, it can be very discouraging when they first take on performance testing as they would feel lost, not knowing what to look for, what to test and how to test can be very daunting.

Can you relate? Share your voice.

Can you relate to Phuong Le? Taking up a new challenge with a positive learning attitude like hers, while making use of the in-house expertise of various team mates is all it takes to start performance testing.

What sort of performance testing have you come across in your workplace?

Please share your thoughts in comments.

Or if you would like to contribute to the newsletter with your view on testing (in any aspect), please send me a message.

Thanks for reading!