Why do we use performance testing

Performance Testing is a technique carried out to determine system parameters in terms of reliability, sensitivity, and stability under a particular workload. It is the process of analyzing the quality and capability of a product.

Here are some of the reasons why performance testing is important:

There are various reasons that you should consider performance testing your application. Some of those reasons are technical, but the most important is ensuring your server, website, and web applications are all acting as expected under increased load. Performance Testing mainly focuses on the following attributes:

• Responsiveness: It is the ability of software to respond quickly or complete assigned tasks within a reasonable time.

• Stability: It refers to the endurance of software, that is how it behaves under varying workloads. A stable software has the ability to remain stable under changing workloads or over time.

• Reliability: The ability of software to perform a required function under stated conditions for the stated period of time without any errors. It determines whether the software product is secure or not.

• Scalability: The scope of software’s capacity to increase or decrease in performance in response to changes in software’s processing demands. It determines the amount of load the software product can handle at a time.

Also Read: Protocols to be referred to before Testing

Most Common Performance Problems

Most of the performance problems revolve around response time, speed, load time, and poor scalability. Speed is generally one of the most important attributes of an application. Users tend to stay away from slow running applications. Performance testing is done to make sure an aplication runs fast enough to keep a user's attention and interest. The following list of common performance problems and notice how speed is a common factor in many of them:

• Long Load time - Load time is generally the initial time it takes an application to start. You should focus on minimizing it as much as possible.

• Poor response time - It is the time taken for a user to input data into the application until the application outputs a response to that input. Normally, this should be very quick. Repeatedly, if a user has to wait too long, they lose interest

• Poor scalability - A software product endures from poor scalability when it cannot handle the expected no. of users or when it does not contain a wide immense range of users.

• Bottlenecking - Bottlenecks are obstructions in a system that degrade the overall performance of the system. Bottlenecking is when either hardware issues or coding errors cause a decrease of throughput under certain loads. Bottlenecking is generally caused by one faulty section of code. Bottlenecking is often fixed by either fixing poor running processes or adding additional Hardware. The most common performance bottlenecks are:

1. Operating System limitations

2. CPU utilization

3. Memory utilization

4. Disk usage

5. Network utilization

Also Read: How to write test cases

Performance Testing Types

• Load testing- It is a type of performance testing that checks the application's ability to perform under anticipated user loads. The main objective is to identify performance bottlenecks before the software application goes live.

• Stress testing-It involves testing a system application under extreme workloads to see how it handles high traffic or data processing. The purpose is to identify the breaking point of an application.

• Endurance testing - It is done to make sure that the software can handle the expected load over a long period of time.

• Spike testing - It involves testing the software's reaction to sudden large spikes in the load generated by users.

• Volume testing - In Volume Testing a large number of Data is populated in a database and the overall software system's behavior is monitored. The objective of volume testing is to analyze the software application's performance under varying database volumes.

• Scalability testing- It determines the software application's effectiveness in "scaling up" to support an increase in user load

We, at Oodles Technologies, provide end-to-end SaaS app development services to address varied project requirements of enterprises. Our end-to-end software development services include quality assurance and software testing services. Explore our quality assurance services for enterprises. For more information, reach us out at [email protected].