Need and Benefits of Performance Testing

An application’s success and popularity depends on its features and functionality that it provides. There is a theory that more the application is robust, more will be its complexity. It will make no sense if your application’s real time performance does not meet the expectations. Application not responding, hanging, run-time-errors are all related to application’s real time performance. An effective application is one which can remain stable and perform in different conditions and on different platforms. 

Performance testing is mainly used to analyze the application’s performance in different conditions, different scenarios and other related criteria. In today’s competitive world, an application will only survive if it performs well under any give circumstances. Performance testing with proper measures will help in getting dynamic results, help in evaluating the scope of an application under real time load and stress conditions. Performance testing can be performed at any stage of software development life 

Performance Testing can be performed to check each and every aspect of an application. There are different types of performance testing measures. Here are the details.

• Load Testing: This type of performance testing helps in evaluating the application response when there is too much load on the application server due to user load for a given duration. This testing helps in checking application’s performance when put under lot of load and can get result based on that.
  
  
• Stress Testing: This type of performance testing helps in evaluating application’s performance by gradually increasing load over a period of time. This type of testing helps in finding out the point where the application tends to break or hangs. By find these type of issues developer can focus on creating an algorithm that would rectify this issue and eliminated the break point in the application.
  
  
• Endurance Testing: This type of testing is used when you want to test whether an application would crash or not when operated with significant load for a particular period of time. It also checks whether application slows down or performs well if significant load is pushed on them.
  
  
• Spike Testing: This testing is performed to check the performance of an application if load increases or decreases suddenly. This testing helps in evaluating whether sudden increase in load is causing any effect on application’s performance or not.
  
  
• Volume Testing: As the name suggests this testing deal with the volume of data. This testing is performed on data centric application. Applications that are related to transaction processing tend to deal with specific amount of data. For these types of application volume testing is implemented to check it’s performance when bulk amount of data is loaded.

Before coming to the conclusion, one should know the tools that are to be used while performing performance testing. This testing is performed at different layers like it can be client side, network based, application, database related or it can be third party services. This testing helps in finding root cause of performance issues. Also helps in analyzing performance trend to find out it’s impact when used in long run.