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.

Delivering a seamless user experience

Ensure Performance with Proactive Testing and Observability

When optimizing software, usability and functionality often take center stage, but performance and stability are just as critical. In a world with high accessibility demands and frequent changes, issues like slow load times, downtime, and failures under heavy load can frustrate users and harm business outcomes. Performance testing is essential to predict user experience and ensure the software handles its intended capacity.

Performance tests evaluate key factors such as usability but also availability, resource utilization, and scalability, offering insights into areas like network load to enable proactive improvements. Introducing these tests early in development helps identify and address issues before they escalate.

Beyond testing, continuous observability through real-time monitoring ensures quick detection and resolution of performance issues post-launch. Regular capacity tests further ensure the system scales with user growth, maintaining reliability.

By integrating early performance testing, continuous observability, and automation, you can ensure high-quality solutions, enhance user experience and drive stronger business results.

Our team helps you

maintain product's reliability and stability

End-to-end testing Simulating user interactions and 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

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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.