Best Practices For Realistic Performance Testing

Performance testing plays important role in software testing industry. But in order to get success in performance testing you need to follow proper techniques and best approaches.

Listed below are some of the best performance testing approaches you must follow:

1. Prefer to set a baseline for user experience

Performance is not just a question of load testing and application responsiveness level. But here you must know how the users are satisfied and what you have to do to increase user experience. Improving performance of the web app gets you to next level but if it crashes in between then your business may effect. So you must know from both view point as performance and user stability.

2. Create Realistic Tests

Putting 1000’s of clients at a server cluster might pass stress-test your environment, but it is not going to precisely measure how your application or website performs in a real-world situation. Generally there are two kinds of issues that you need to consider to set up your testing environment.

First, the testbed must replicate the variety of devices and client environments being used to access the system. We knows that your app get traffic from various types of mobile devices and operating system, web browsers and for this we have to consider load testing.  

Also, this load is far from expected, so the test needs to be built with unpredictability and inconsistency in mind, mixing up the device and client environment load on the fly. By constantly varying the environment and the kind of data that is passed, the development association faces less surprises down the road after the application is put into production.

3. Know the difference between measured speed and observed performance

Performance may not be the same from your viewpoint and from user viewpoint. Are you totally depends upon load times of your app? If yes then don’t your potential users are not waiting for your app to load with stopwatches. Instead of this they are eagerly waiting for your app to do something useful for them.

So how rapidly can users come to valuable data? To find out, you must prefer to include client processing time in measuring your load time. This will help in detecting the exact load time and performance of your app.

4. Correlate performance issues to underlying problems

Let's assume that you have created a robust testing environment and have detailed understandings of the performance from user viewpoint. Now what next? To be effective, your software testing approach must associate performance bottlenecks with the code that's forming problems.

In order to deal with this your team follow two procedures. Firstly team prefer to use caching system to make sure that duplicate data entry is not there in the fresh database call.

Secondly, the team must focus on the efficiency of the app and how to improve it. Though, the team could only isolate the problems by testing the system under a realistic workload and tracing the bottlenecks back to the code.

5. Make performance testing part of agile development

Always make performance testing as a part of agile testing methodologies.  If you are doing this then it may results in failure as any problem found at the end of the project are probably delay your project completion deadline by throwing that project back into development firefighting mode.

By making this testing as a part then you can easily find problems and fix them quickly. And according to me, software testing process must be collaborated with the development team which means that performance engineering must be represented in all the scrum meetings on a regular basis and provided with the tasks of measuring and following performance as the code is developed, within the same software development lifecycle.