A Quick Learning Guide To Software Performance Testing

Applications introduced to the audience with poor performance metrics are likely to attain a lousy reputation and fail to sustain in the market. If performance testing is ignored before launching the product, businesses lose a high number of users and are forced to spend a significant cost on the further fixing of bugs.  Hence, performance testing is done to identify the issues with speed, stability and scalability. Performance testing is defined as a non-functional testing technique to ensure software performs well under the expected workload.

Software performance testing is executed to serve the following intended purposes:

•    To determine whether the application meets the defined performance standards.

•    It examines two or more applications with the objective of determining which one can perform better by comparing them.

•    Performance testing is done to cover the points which are responsible for the poor performance of the application.

Following are the attributes of performance testing :

Load Testing

It is conducted to evaluate the behaviour of a system at an increasing workload. Load testing results in measuring significant performance errors before the software application goes live. Load test helps to distinguish the performance of the system under a user load in a specific period. At this stage, you can make sure the app works fine even after an increased workload.

Stress Testing

Stress testing is a part of software performance testing which is performed to find whether the application can perform well even under high traffic data processing. It tests application software under the extreme workload and identifies the breaking point of the application. Stress test checks system performance on the higher capacity limit load and beyond its possibilities. In this way, it becomes easy to find out what components will break in extreme conditions and whether the system can recover from stress or not.

Endurance Testing

In this process parameters such as memory, utilisation is monitored to detect memory leaks or other performance issues. It checks how the system working capacity behaves for a longer duration of time. The main aim of this testing type is to prevent memory leaks or problems with hardware and servers.

Spike Testing

Spike testing is performed to test the software's potential to unexpected large spikes in the load generated by users.  Spike testing is achieved by raising the number of users abruptly and measuring the performance of the system. The main aim is to make sure whether the system will be able to sustain the workload or not.

Volume Testing

Volume testing is performed to check how software behaves under varying database volumes. It is also known as called flood testing as it tests floods the system with data.

Scalability Testing

Scalability testing is part of software performance testing that determines if software is efficiently handling increasing workloads. It helps in determining the software application's effectiveness in scaling up to sustain an increase in user load. This can be determined by constantly adding to the user load or data volume while monitoring system performance.