What is performance testing in QA?

To understand what exactly is performance and why are performance testing services necessary. Let’s understand the basics. Optimal performance is what everybody longs for in, be it for your mobile phone, desktop computer, applications, clouds or any other quantifiable product. That means any software or hardware making its way to the production phase must need to be tested for a complete performance, to make sure it delivers what it is required to.

Unfortunately, there is no single parameter that determines the performance of the software or hardware instead performance testing is a set of varieties of tests that checks the integrity of different components.

Considering comprehensive software Performance Testing Services as one of the core methods to deliver desirable user experience, the modern age testers have excelled themselves in all the complex nuances involved in the entire process. The results are only going to be better if this progressiveness continues and evolves with the ongoing technology changes in this digital space.

The teams initiate the load and performance testing session from the planning stage and then slowly proceed to the developmental stage to ensure that the product performs seamlessly, fulfills the requirements and generate the maximum projected ROI. A detailed performance testing consists of:

• Volume testing

• Scalability testing

• Load testing

• Stress testing

• Endurance testing

• Spike testing

Volume Testing is responsible for finding the amount of data that can be handled by the application. It effectively evaluates the productivity of the app under an atmosphere of continuously increasing volume of stored and processed data.

Scalability Testing a non-functional testing method responsible for measuring the capability or the performance of the application in terms of its capacity to scale up / down with a flux in processing power and altered architecture. While delivering Software Performance Testing Services for a scalable environment, a prominent challenge that engineers face is measuring the system capacity. The performance testing teams must practice right sizing and follow the best performance testing practices for accurate performance projection in a scaled-up environment. This scalability testing process helps in avoiding application breakdown during peak hours and ensures maximum output.

Load Testing - The load testing process effectively uses modern day testing techniques to generate virtual traffic on the system and record its performance. The objective of the test is to reduce the overall time taken by the app to process a command or operation under a significant amount of load increase. The testing team also rectifies any potential system bottlenecks and their solutions.

Stress Testing - It enables the engineer to check the resilience of the application, device, platform or network under extreme conditions such as overcapacity of users and system failures or crashes. These stress conditions reveal the loopholes that might cripple the software under real-world conditions.

Soak Testing - Also known as ‘Endurance Testing'. Extensively used to determine the performance or endurance level of the application under continuous load for an extended time period. This testing method helps in rectifying memory leakage issues.

Spike Testing - This testing method determines the capability of the application when placed with sudden changes in the number of users on the system.

In this era of agile development and quick customer response, testing can not be related to the development phase only, instead it needs to be an ongoing process at all phases. With the rise of cloud, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, companies need to re-think their testing strategies and implement comprehensive performance testing services for a lightning-fast creation, execution, maintenance and a worthy performance report with actionable analytics.

Colleen Sylvia is a technology enthusiast who loves to read and write about trending tech subjects. Colleen has written articles for several leading journals over several years.