What is Performance Testing?

Performance Testing is defined as a type of software testing to ensure software applications will perform well under their expected workload.

Features and Functionality supported by a software system is not the only concern. A software application's performance like its response time, reliability, resource usage, and scalability do matter. The goal of Performance Testing is not to find bugs but to eliminate performance bottlenecks.

The focus of Performance Testing is checking a software program's

• Speed - Determines whether the application responds quickly
• Scalability - Determines the maximum user load the software application can handle.
• Stability - Determines if the application is stable under varying loads

Performance Testing is popularly called “Perf Testing” and is a subset of performance engineering.

Why do Performance Testing?

Performance Testing is done to provide stakeholders with information about their application regarding speed, stability, and scalability. More importantly, Performance Testing uncovers what needs to be improved before the product goes to market. Without Performance Testing, the software is likely to suffer from issues such as: running slow while several users use it simultaneously, inconsistencies across different operating systems and poor usability.

Performance testing will determine whether their software meets speed, scalability and stability requirements under expected workloads. Applications sent to the market with poor performance metrics due to nonexistent or poor performance testing are likely to gain a bad reputation and fail to meet expected sales goals.

Also, mission-critical applications like space launch programs or life-saving medical equipment should be performance tested to ensure that they run for a long period without deviations.

It's estimated that companies lost sales worth $1100 per second due to a recent Amazon Web Service Outage.

Hence, performance testing is important.

Performance Testing Process

The methodology adopted for performance testing can vary widely but the objective for performance tests remains the same. It can help demonstrate that your software system meets certain pre-defined performance criteria. Or it can help compare the performance of two software systems. It can also help identify parts of your software system which degrade its performance.

Below is a generic process on how to perform performance testing.

1. Identify your testing environment - Know your physical test environment, production environment and what testing tools are available. Understand details of the hardware, software and network configurations used during testing before you begin the testing process. It will help testers create more efficient tests. It will also help identify possible challenges that testers may encounter during the performance testing procedures.
2. Identify the performance acceptance criteria - This includes goals and constraints for throughput, response times and resource allocation. It is also necessary to identify project success criteria outside of these goals and constraints. Testers should be empowered to set performance criteria and goals because often the project specifications will not include a wide enough variety of performance benchmarks. Sometimes there maybe none at all. When possible finding a similar application to compare to is a good way to set performance goals.
3. Plan & design performance tests - Determine how usage is likely to vary amongst end-users and identify key scenarios to test for all possible use cases. It is necessary to simulate a variety of end-users, plan performance test data and outline what metrics will be gathered.
4. Configuring the test environment - Prepare the testing environment before execution. Also, arrange tools and other resources.
5. Implement test design - Create the performance tests according to your test design.
6. Run the tests - Execute and monitor the tests.
7. Analyze, tune and retest - Consolidate, analyze and share test results. Then fine-tune and test again to see if there is an improvement or decrease in performance. Since improvements generally grow smaller with each retest, stop when bottlenecking is caused by the CPU. Then you may have the consider option of increasing CPU power.

Jmeter and Blazemeter are one of the leading tools used for load testing of web and application servers.

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