Performance Testing

With advancements in technology, users have become accustomed to faster and more efficient digital experiences. They expect software and apps to leverage technology to ensure responsiveness and deliver optimal performance.

Optimizing your software

Prioritizing Performance and Stability

When optimizing software, we often talk about usability and functionality as the highest priority, but performance and stability are at least as important. In an increasingly complex world with high accessibility requirements and frequent changes, the risk of the user experience being negatively affected increases. Long load times, unavailable services, and features that don't work under heavy load are very frustrating for users and can harm your business results. That’s why it’s important to test the performance of the software to predict the user experience and ensure that it can handle the intended capacity.

Performance tests focus on aspects such as usability, availability, resource utilization and scalability, and provide valuable insights about network load for example, enabling proactive measures for improvement. We always aim to introduce performance testing as early as possible in the development process.

In addition to performance tests, it is important to continuously monitor and update the system after launch. With real-time monitoring, you can quickly identify and fix performance issues before they affect users. In addition, capacity testing should be carried out regularly to ensure that the system can scale up with increasing user volumes.

By implementing performance tests early, continuously monitoring the system, and using automation, you can ensure that your solutions not only meet but exceed user expectations and requirements. This leads to an improved user experience and stronger business results, which is the core of delivering high-quality products.

Our team helps you

maintain product reliability and stability

End-to-end testing Simulating user interactions and production-level business loads to evaluate system performance.

Component testing Evaluating the performance of components such as APIs, before their integration into the system.

Limit Testing Identifying the system's breaking point by pushing it to its maximum capacity.

Endurance testing Assessing the system's performance and stability over periods of continuous use.

Robustness testing Evaluating the system's resilience and ability when a component fails.

Volume testing Assessing how the system behaves when subjected to large volumes of data.

Implementing performance testing

Need help on your project?

Share your project specifics and challenges with us, and our expert team will help you define strategies to improve your application's performance and ensure it meets your end users expectations.

FAQ

Common questions about performance testing

What is the optimal approach for an organization that has not yet invested in performance testing to begin implementing it?

Consider the user's perspective as paramount. If you, as a manual tester, notice sluggishness, it's crucial to address it promptly. Highlight the urgency of improving response times and delve into the root causes behind the delays. We must analyze what's causing the slowdowns and simulate heavier loads to replicate real-world scenarios.

In today's agile environment, everyone bears responsibility for performance, not just a specialized team. Performance isn't an afterthought; it's integral from the project's inception. If performance issues arise during functional tests, they must be resolved immediately. The end goal is seamless operation, and achieving this requires a collective testing mindset from the outset.

Don't rely solely on an operations team to handle performance concerns. Start integrating performance testing into your team's workflow early on. If nobody is taking the lead, take the initiative within your team to prioritize performance testing.

How do you write effective performance requirements?

One effective approach to crafting robust performance requirements is to orchestrate a risk workshop, engaging product owners to prioritize risks. Inviting market experts is essential, leveraging their insights to anticipate future trends and broaden the scope of testing beyond present scenarios. Furthermore, it's crucial to include the operations team to gain insights into system behavior and concerns. Subsequently, delineating requirements and formulating test cases using a risk-based methodology becomes possible, focusing on mitigating the most substantial risks.

Are performance tests something you perform continuously, or during a specific day/week? 

We recommend running them in conjunction with deployments.

Perform them continuously and at a smaller scale to stay informed about any impact that a new update could have, for instance delayed response time.

Carry out these tests continuously but on a smaller scale to prevent any performance-degrading elements from being introduced into the codebase. Just like regular code check-ins and regression tests, these tests should be ongoing. Additionally, more comprehensive performance tests can be conducted every two weeks or monthly.

In summary, load test can be done in a Shift Left strategy to test performance of Microservices and API, in an Agile strategy, then some end-to-end load test have to be done in order to give the real user perception of the response time in a nominal number of users vision, and of course the performance of the application has to be monitored and followed in production.

Should I prioritize performance testing and improvements for a system nearing the end of its life cycle?

New systems can take time and you don't want to lose customers and business in the meantime. It is good that some plan to improve the current if it is the case that there is a performance problem.

Think risk based. If it is a system that you think you will keep for 2 years but not update much more, then maybe the risk is less. If it works well and you see that it works well with APM tools in production, the need to actively work with performance tests in that way is reduced. It works well with current load.