How Performance Testing can ensure the Delivery of High-Performance Software

Any software released into the market should fit into the crucible of customer acceptability with respect to attributes such as reliability, responsiveness, and stability. Designing and developing such high-performing software applications is a continuous challenge for enterprises due to their complexity and changes in customer preferences. In a day and age of powerful ERP software being deployed by enterprises to run their operations, connect with their clients, vendors, and end customers, and develop and deliver products or services, ensuring their quality on a continuous basis has become a challenge of sorts. Thanks to digital transformation, there is a thrust towards developing innovative software products that are competitive and capable of monetizing the business value of speed. This can often leave enterprises to ignore the crucial aspect of testing, thereby leaving the software applications vulnerable to failure.

As per the CPSQ report of 2020, the total cost of poor software quality in the United States alone amounted to a whopping $2.08 trillion. The number of software failures is staggering and increasing at an alarming rate. These pertain to ransomware attacks and IT outages, including data breaches affecting millions of customers worldwide. Most software failures happen due to the presence of bugs, ambiguities, unexpected use of software tools, and carelessness – in short, a lack of sufficient testing.

Enterprises, in a bid to attract customers, often resort to adding new features to their websites or applications without taking recourse to comprehensive testing procedures, especially performance testing. The results are obvious, with the applications not being able to perform optimally when subjected to increased load thresholds. These are most evident in the Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales when customers reach out to the e-commerce software portals in droves. Due to lack of application performance testing, many e-commerce companies end up losing money when the software stutters, shows latency, or worse, fails to take the excess load. For instance, big retailers such as H&M and Costco grappled with downtime lasting more than ten hours. However, for most e-commerce players, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales largely went without glitches, especially during the pandemic.

According to Forbes, Cyber Monday raked in revenues of $10.8 billion thanks to enterprises learning from past mistakes and preparing well in advance. Some of the websites, namely, Walmart, Apple, and Victoria’s Secret, delivered optimal user experiences with a load time of below 2 seconds, a remarkable feat indeed. These examples show how the application of a robust performance testing strategy can work wonders, especially when it counts. So, for any performance testing company, the remit is clear – ensure the software meets the requirements of stability, speed, and responsiveness under workloads to deliver a positive user experience.

It is by considering typical parameters such as data transfer rates, processing speed, network throughput, reliability, and workload efficiency that enterprises can ensure the development and delivery of high-performance software quickly. Also, performance engineering can be integrated into the development life cycle of a software product to ensure the performance parameters, namely, latency, throughput, or memory usage, are met. It helps to identify possible glitches or bottlenecks in the software or system, including scalability issues, before deploying the product.

What can comprehensive performance testing deliver?

When the stakes are high, especially with high workload scenarios, any performance testing company needs to take a result-oriented performance testing approach to detect and fix communications and computing bottlenecks within a software system. This type of testing can help identify the location or nature of any performance-related issue that can otherwise cause the software to fail or show latency. For e-commerce companies, this form of testing can prepare them to face a major event such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, as evident in the recent instances mentioned above. The types of performance testing to be executed by enterprises can include stress testing, load testing, spike testing, soak testing, capacity testing, and scalability testing.

What are the metrics used in a performance testing methodology?

The performance metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), can help enterprises evaluate the performance of their software applications and systems. These may include:

Throughput: The amount of information a software system can process over a specific time period. It is mainly dependent on the available processing power of the system’s components.

Memory: The storage space available for processing a piece of information in real-time. So, the less memory space, the less information gets processed, leading to poor response time.

Latency or response time: It pertains to the time lag between a user’s query and the system’s response. So, the greater the time lag, the greater the latency.

Bandwidth: The quantum of data moving across a network and between workloads per second.

CPU interrupts per second: The number of interruptions from hardware components a process receives every second.

How to execute performance testing

The generic process of executing performance testing services is mentioned below:

Define a test environment: At the outset, the test and production environments should be clearly defined, including the tools to be used.

Configure a test environment: Get resources to build the test environment and implement it for testing.

Define the performance criteria: The performance testing goals and metrics should be identified before proceeding with the actual testing process. It is against such metrics that testing should be conducted and outcomes verified.

Plan a test: Write test cases in accordance with the performance metrics and test all user scenarios.

Actual execution: Performance testing should be executed – manually and automatically with proper monitoring.

Analyze, report, and retest: Document the test results and analyze them for failed tests. After fixing the glitches, retest to see if the performance has improved or decreased.

Conclusion

Performance issues can mar the credibility of any software application and the company releasing it. These should be duly mitigated before releasing the product in the market. So, effort should be made to conduct a comprehensive application performance testing exercise to ensure optimal performance and the delivery of superior user experiences.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.