#performanceloadtesting

[vikram739]

What are the Newer Trends in Performance Testing and Engineering?

Rising competition across the business landscape is forcing enterprises to up their ante and leverage cutting-edge technology to reach out to their target customers. On the customer’s side, the amazing array of diverse products and services is enough to drive frenzy, confusion, and demand. The tech-savvy and highly demanding customers of today want every application to perform 24 x 7, 365 days a year across a plethora of devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. Business enterprises are hard-pressed to cater to this segment of customers and are migrating to newer technology to stay relevant and competitive. They need to deliver products or services while focusing on personalization, customization, predictions, analytics, and user preferences, among others.

However, adopting the latest technologies can impact the performance of a software application in one way or another. It is only due to the improved performance of software applications that customers can adopt them and help businesses increase revenue. Performance testing services are an important part of the SDLC that help to determine if the performance of the software application is on target. Let us look at the performance testing trends that can help business enterprises score over their competitors and deliver superior customer experiences.

Top performance testing trends of today

Leveraging performance testing services is necessary to prevent the software application from facing downtime, lag, or other issues. These services can help with easy tracking of issues that have the potential to impact the functionality, features, and end-user experience. The trends in performance testing and engineering are as follows:

Protocol-based load tests versus real browser-based tests

Traditionally, protocol-based load testing is used to test web pages and applications for multiple protocols such as IMAP, AJAX, and DNS. However, with React and Angular-based web development frameworks, a huge amount of computation has moved to the browser engine. So, neglecting performance load testing using real browsers can generate vague results and create performance issues. Since real users largely interface with browsers, QA testers should adopt browser-based load testing services, including choosing performance metrics for JavaScript and HTML/CSS code rendering. This will ensure the running of load tests that are very close to what real users are likely to face.

Shift-left testing 

Here, application performance testing is run very early in the development cycle and is made part of each sprint. It aims to monitor performance metrics if and when a new feature is added to the application. This allows the QA testers to determine if the bugs or issues present in the code can cause performance degradation. A robust performance testing strategy should be set up so that performance tests are triggered at every new stage of development. Besides, the results of such tests should be compared to the performance trends of previous test runs.

Chaos testing or engineering

Chaos testing is about understanding how the application should behave when failures are randomly created in one part of the application’s architecture. Since several uncertainties can take place in the production environment, chaos engineering can help identify such scenarios and the behavior of the application or system. It allows testers to understand if any cascading issues are going to be triggered due to the failure in other parts of the system. Such a performance testing approach can make the system resilient. In other words, if one part of the web services or database faces sudden downtime, it should not affect the entire infrastructure. Chaos engineering can help find vulnerabilities or loopholes in the application so that any performance issues can be predicted and mitigated beforehand.    

Automated testing using AI

Performance testing scripts are often changed based on customer behavior changes. However, with AI and machine learning, business enterprises can identify the patterns around the user journey and know what the real users are up to when using the software application or visiting the web platform. AI can help the QA team use a performance testing methodology to generate automated scripts that can eventually find new issues or vulnerabilities in the system.

Conclusion 

The above-mentioned trends in performance testing can help business enterprises scale and adapt to the dynamically changing software development frameworks. By keeping abreast with the latest technologies and key testing trends, businesses can ensure stable applications, superior user experiences, and possibly customer loyalty.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Article Source: apmdigest.com

[vikram739]

What are the Top Ways to Execute Website Performance Testing?

Any website needs to be evaluated against a host of parameters such as stability, loading speed, stability, and scalability under varying load thresholds before it is deployed for actual use. This is of utmost importance as a website with poor functionality and usability can affect its user experience and get rejected by the very users it wants to reach out to. Remember, outages with websites or software can make a big impact on a brand’s popularity as evident in the cases of Facebook, Lloyds Bank, and Jetstar. For instance, on March 14, 2019, Facebook was not accessible to many people due to a server configuration change. Also, Virgin Blue’s reservations management website faced an outage for 11 days leaving many passengers stranded, and the company Navitaire ended up paying more than $20 million to Virgin Blue as compensation.

As per Gartner, the average cost accrued due to IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. And since businesses operate differently, the lower end cost of downtime can be around $140,000 per hour vis-a-vis $540,000 per hour at the higher end. These statistics prove that website performance testing cannot be downplayed or ignored when it comes to understanding the robustness and responsiveness of a website under a reasonable load. So, let us discuss the best performance testing strategy to adopt in order to achieve an optimal website performance under realistic benchmarks.

Best practices for conducting website performance testing 

Since today’s users do not countenance websites with functional discrepancies, it is critical to conduct web service performance testing to validate the website’s ability to meet all pre-defined performance benchmarks. Performance testing can help you determine the speed, responsiveness, stability, and scalability of a website in varying conditions or circumstances, namely, heavy user traffic. The best practices are as follows:

#1. Create a baseline for user experience: A website is not only about responsiveness or load times, but also knowing how satisfied the users are while using it. For instance, a balance must be reached between meeting all sundry parameters instead of just a few. So, decreasing page load time should not be at the expense of stability, as a sudden website crash can throw all calculations out of the window. The performance testing methodology should be holistic and consider the entire user experience instead of looking at just one parameter.

#2. Set realistic benchmarks for performance: It may happen that the expectations for the website are not realistic enough, prompting you to skip certain aspects of performance load testing. However, such an approach can let the website face latency or downtime when subjected to realistic user traffic. For example, an e-commerce website should be robust enough to perform optimally on special days such as Black Friday or Christmas when the user traffic is significantly high. There are innumerable examples of companies facing users’ ire when their websites do not perform during crunch times.

So, it is important to set realistic parameters based on practical scenarios. The testbed should use different devices and client environments to test whether the website performs more or less optimally across device platforms. This is due to the fact that users browsing the website can use any device, browser, or operating system. Further, text simulation should not begin from zero as the load need not always go to zero and slowly rise from that baseline. If at all, such a simulation can give the test engineer a false picture of the load threshold.

#3. Record traffic after clearing browser cache: If the cookies and cache are full during the recording of a user scenario, the browser uses these data to process and deliver client requests rather than dealing with the server (sending data to and getting a response from the server.) In fact, there are specific tools that get a new browser to record tests.

#4. Test early and often: Website performance testing can sometimes be an afterthought and is often conducted in response to user complaints. However, it should be made an integral part of the SDLC using the Agile’s iterative testing approach. Set it up as a part of unit testing and repeat the tests on a bigger scale, especially at the later stages nearing completion. Use automated application performance testing tools as part of the pass-fail pipeline. In this pipeline, the ‘pass’ code moves through the pipeline while the ‘fail’ code goes back to the developer for fixing.

#5. Measured speed vs. perceived performance: Merely measuring load times can be misleading and missing the big picture, for the yardsticks of performance can vary from user to user. The users aren’t only waiting for the website or application to load but want it to respond to their requests. And to know how fast users can get responses (read useful data) to their requests, include the user processing time as an element in measuring load times. Here, the tester may push the processing work from the server to the client, which can make pages to load quickly from a server standpoint. However, forcing the client to process extra can turn the real load time longer. Although pushing the processing to the client need not be a bad performance testing approach but the impact on perceived speed should be taken into account as well. It is advisable to measure performance from the perspective of an user rather than from the server.

#6 Build a performance model: Performance testing should include understanding the website’s capacity and planning its steady state. This can be in terms of the average user sessions, the number of concurrent users, server utilization at the peak period, and simultaneous requests. Also, suitable performance goals should be defined, such as maximum response times, acceptable performance metrics, system scalability, and user satisfaction scores.  

Conclusion 

It is not enough to provide the results of performance testing, for the next step should be to triage the system performance and reach out to all stakeholders; developers, testers, and people manning operations. So, the key to any realistic performance testing is to take a broad view - infrastructure for realistic testing, tracing errors to their source, and collaborating with developers.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Article Source: wattpad.com