Top 5 ways to bring the best from your Performance Testing efforts

The stiff competition in the online environment has made the customers of today choosy, demanding and vulnerable at the same time. Business enterprises, with the purported aim of extending their market footprint, are launching multiple products for different user groups (based on age, gender, geography, and purchasing power). The product launches consider user preferences, predictions, and analytics to drive better customization and personalization. The rapid pace of product launches by businesses is driven by the objectives of retaining the existing customer base, adding new ones, and staying competitive.

The products should possess certain characteristics – available 24 x 7, scalable to accommodate any future growth, reliable, and intuitive. Moreover, high speed has become the new normal with customers expecting their software products to respond in milliseconds. If these were not enough, the advent of new technologies or methodologies such as DevOps, Agile, SMAC, VPN, IoT, and Big Data among others have created new challenges for enterprises to integrate them in their workflows. The challenges are mostly in terms of achieving a seamless performance of the application across digital touchpoints. The realisation has dawned upon enterprises about executing performance testing (PT) beyond the realm of load and stress testing. Let us understand how businesses can bring out the best in their performance testing strategy in an Agile environment.

#1. Performance to be the focus area: In the Agile-DevOps development and testing environment, testers should be tasked with executing a range of performance testing services. This can only be ensured should performance be included in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In other words, an application cannot reach the delivery stage unless the SLA parameters pertaining to performance are met. Moreover, a detailed test strategy should determine the test types that are needed to make the application future proof, scalable, robust, and dynamic. The test strategy should be in accordance with the real-time environment.

#2. Focus on performance engineering: Since the performance of an application encompasses non-functional requirements such as throughput, memory usage or latency, the testing team should make performance engineering (PE) its focus area, preferably at the beginning of the design phase. The test team should stay ahead of the curve by engaging with the developers. This can be done by being a part of scrum like meetings where updates related to development are planned and discussed. The test team should analyze if the updates or changes need new load or stress tests, for the team can deliver a positive outcome should it deal with such changes in a proactive manner. Moreover, the test team should build an Agile-based performance engineering framework to cater to the ever-changing dynamics of technology and market.

#3. Component-based testing: Since performance related issues can derail the functioning of an application not to speak of hitting the end user experience negatively, the test team should focus on individual components post finding the errors. The performance testing strategy should aim at isolating the erring component and dealing with it rather than looking at the overall module. AI-based automation can play an important role in driving this strategy, for the test script can zero in on the exact component causing the error or deviation of the outcome from expected lines. In the ultimate analysis, such an approach can save the organization money and effort.

1. Optimization of technology and infrastructure: Application performance testing deals with issues such as scalability or performance of a software application when the latter undergoes integration (with legacy systems or cloud) or upgrades. Since the emphasis is more towards achieving cost rationalization, the performance engineering approach looks at embracing cloud and virtualized environments. This leads to the provisioning of on-demand resources and sharing of hardware systems. Also, in view of the popularity of Web 2.0, the front-end PT/PE should deliver personalized user experiences across devices, networks, browsers, and operating systems.
2. Real-time tests: Since the applications will be used in a real-time environment with constraints of bandwidth, the typical PT/PE exercise should emulate a real world network. Here, virtual users shall download the software application in an environment having a weak signal strength. Thus, by simulating latency the test team can ascertain the requirement for parallel connections to achieve faster response times.

Conclusion

To sustain and compete in today’s online environment, a software application should be scalable, available, customizable, secure and predictable. However, should the application features not function according to the user expectations, the business can lose its customers - not to speak of its brand equity. It is only a robust PT/PE routine incorporated at all layers of the SDLC, which can ensure the performance to be seamless and top notch.