10 Best Practices for Performance Testing

What is Performance Testing

Performance Testing can be used to quickly identify the functional bugs and load handling bugs- performance bugs which are difficult to detect.

10 best practices for performance testing

1. Understand your application

Before you go through with the implementation, it is necessary to get the understanding of the application and the capabilities it offers. Also, limitations of the application play a major role to run the performance testing. Team should have a list of common factors that affect the performance of the application.

2. Make it a part of your Unit tests

If we implement the performance testing in a later stage of SDLC then it becomes more difficult and costly to make the changes on the later stage of the development process. So, it is advisable to implement performance testing as a part of Unit testing  to identify performance issue on the early stage of the development. Implementing performance testing helps you to identify the issues early but will also allow developers to closely work with testers to improve the quality of the software.

3. Set realistic performance benchmarks

This is very important to set realistic and practical scenarios. However, the load can not be predicted. You need to ensure that test scenarios includes different devices and environments in which your application will have to thrive Moreover , most tests are conducted right from the base followed by adding load until the desired threshold is reached. The fact is that load may not go down to nill and slowly progress from there.

4. Understand performance from the user’s perspective .

Basically, we tend to focus on the response of the servers. But it is important to consider the user experience. If the server load test is satisfactory it is not always necessary that the user also will have the same experience. Tests should capture each user’s experience and user interface timings systematically with concomitance to the metrics derived from the server. Combining the user perspectives, including a Beta version of the product can enable you to capture the complete experience. Matrics can be derived and the behavior of the users can be monitored to measure the experience.

5. Implement DevOps

Implementing DevOps culture will help you to bring together your development and testing teams together and it helps to identify errors through continuous testing and solving immediately.

6. Consistently Report and Analyze the Results.

Test Reports are also important along with performance test design and execution. Analyzing and reporting results consistently helps to determine future updates and fixes. Reports for developers should differ from the report sent to project owners, managers or customers.

7. Triage performance issue

Once the results of a performance test is provided, the next step should be to triage the code/ application and system performance by involving all parties , developers ,testers. Application Monitoring Tools can provide clarity reading the effectiveness of triage. Your efforts are only as good as the tools you use. It is better to include a mix of manual and automated testing across all systems.

8. Use a build server to initiate recurring tests.

With every build, performance tests should feature among the recurring tests. You can achieve this by initiating the test via the build server and test results produced within the build tool. So this is the way ,the person who started the build can see the results and would be knowing the changes were made in that build.

9. Opt for mocking

You can check the components in isolation by using mocking for component testing.This way, you can ensure high-quality tests that facilitate continuous delivery.

10. Repurposing of testing assets.

Automation that leverages this identification to give these paths a priority of testing. Many companies are also repurposing their functional assets against test targets at a later stage in the development pipeline.

Conclusion

Remember, Basic Performance Test can bring major benefits to your way and it can improve the performance and quality of the software.