What Factors Must be Considered for the Success of Performance Testing?

There’s an Italian famous proverb “It is not enough to aim, you must hit!”. You might be thinking now what difficult sentence it is. Well, it has a lot of lessons one can have. This proverb means that if you have aimed something to achieve then do whatever you can to achieve it, make it a hit instead of just saying you will. When it comes to the business world, organizations have high aims but are not investing efforts to achieve the desired goal. Many businesses aim to improve their business performance but they fail to make it hit because they don’t consider important hidden factors that would lead them to the better performance of their products.

When it comes to the software development industry, the performance of a software application or product is the most important concern of the users and customers taking. Users are continuously evaluating the software applications of different brands, they are tech-savvy and know what’s new and trendy in the market. Normally, organizations of today want their objectives to be achieved without investing or making efforts to achieve it. Planning is good but a plan alone is not sufficient unless you do something to make that plan work. That’s what the Italian proverb is all about. Organizations often skip or invest a little in the performance testing of their software products and applications. However, testing the performance of apps is pivotal. One good way of testing performance is to partner with performance testing companies. A performance testing company ensures that the app you are planning to launch is performing according to the user’s expectations or not. Partnering is a nice option when you have not enough skilled resources in a specific domain or else if you’re short of time. 

Let’s discuss some of the important factors that must be considered when planning to test the performance of software products and applications;

Identified goals – The goal of the performance test needs to be determined. The methods and objectives of performance testing must be consistent with the overall vision and objectives of the project. It is crucial to understand the purpose of the application or system that requires performance testing. The performance tester needs to understand the system intent, the actual hardware and software architecture, the performance test environment, the comparison between the test environment and the actual production environment, and the characteristics of typical users of the application.

Real-world simulation of scenarios – When it comes to design the performance test scripts it is significant to design real-world simulation of scenarios. Things to consider include identifying the category of users and how they will use the application, what are their user behavior patterns, what activities they will spend time on, what are their expectations for the application, and what are the peaks? Business expectations, what are the scalability predictions of the business, under which technical constraints the application must work, what are the endpoints in the system, and how these endpoints are affected by the increase/decrease in traffic. These considerations will assist in building the workload and workload analysis of the application.

Must have in-depth knowledge – Having in-depth knowledge and understanding about test environments, tools, utilities, load generators, controller, load balancers, test data, logs, monitors which need to be configured across various application layers, firewalls, network, what data to be monitored and collected from the Test runs is necessary. 

Validation of data – In the phase of test execution, verify the tests, test data, configurations, and environmental status. Make sure that the data collected is according to the business requirements and every single monitor is working appropriately. Monitor the results of Test scripts, check the database to ensure transactions have been completed, check whether the workload is applied appropriately and whether it has been accelerated and cooled as designed. Check the server log to identify all alerts (if any). Ensure that all dynamic elements are tackled correctly. Record the start time, end time, and put a time stamp on the plan so that you can clearly understand which plan was executed at what time.

Test Trials – Before actually performing the test, please perform several trials runs to make sure that all configurations, monitors, logs, connectivity, etc. are operating at their best. In this way, you will be able to save an ample amount of time to rework, coordinate, and ensure that the correct data is collected during the execution of the test. Create a run plan for test execution so that all of the stakeholders involved know about their tasks and contributions during the performance test run.

Analyzing the tests – After running the performance test, we recommend you to spend an ample amount of time analyzing the tests. Do not post results without finishing the analysis. Analyze test results by summarizing data from all layers, monitors, server logs, resource utilization data, elapsed time, etc. After you are done with the analysis, the tests and observations, concerns, problems, and inferences drawn from the test run are summarized. Know your stakeholders and their interest in performance testing. Express the analysis visually so that people can easily understand it

Final Thoughts

What comes into your mind when you think of a good app or software product? Best quality, best performance, ease of operating, right? When you are aware of what a good application or software means then why don’t you spend efforts on improvising the performance of your software products? Aiming that we can do this and we can achieve that is easy, but when it comes to taking any action to achieve the aims, many individuals and organizations lack.

In the case of performance testing, not only quality assurance professionals are required to put in their efforts instead it requires the contributions of all stakeholders including the business development team, database team, infrastructure team, and most importantly test team. To ensure the success of performance testing all of these team members have to work in sync.