Enhance your Performance Testing Skills

Why organisations suffer performance issues is because they are not testing their applications under real world situations. And these organisations are not only the start up ones but good established ones too. You should always ensure that your testing is upto the mark rather than being a victim of some very common loopholes that exist while carrying out performance testing.

This blog will take you through the commonly occurred mistakes and how to avoid them for a smooth performance testing.

1. Little/No Attention at the initial phase – the design phase

The first thing that can lead to a problem is ‘planning or lack of planning’. It has been observed that many organisations discard performance considerations during the initial phase, i.e. the design phase and thus as a result the problem starts right here that leads to all sorts of other problems later. It is advisable to induce quality assurance, performance and other types of considerations right at the start of the design phase to avoid any chaos later. You want to be able to get Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place during design so you know what you’re aiming at as you build your solution.

2. Waiting until Software is finished

Several companies show a laid back attitude even for essential performance testing and wake up at the last stage of the application development lifecycle. This certainly leads to some uncomfortable situations. Instead they should understand that it will be so much beneficial to run performance tests throughout the development lifecycle, even if they are unit tests, or even if they are tests against the infrastructure or database, with this you will have a rough idea of the result of performance you expect once there’s a complete solution.

3. Adding a tinge of Hardcoded Data

It is an easy task to test your applications using a tinge of hardcoded data, static data. Though it is little unfortunate that adding the static data does not really give you a true measure of what kind of real performance you can expect once the application goes live. There are many inexpensive data generation tools in the market place that you can use to create massive amount of realistic information. You can opt to feed this information which will give you a much better indication of what kind of performance you can expect once the solution goes live.

4. Keeping Single Use case in focus

It is a common observation that a lot of software development teams test a single use case while performance testing. This can be extremely problematic because in doing so, you are not exactly getting a measure of what kind of performance scenarios your application is likely to encounter in the real world. Some testing tools are easy to use, such as loadUI and soapUI – the world’s most complete testing tool. These testing tools permit you to use a variety of different, statistical approaches from burst to random to steady state to many other kind of variances that will try to give you a much more realistic indication of the real world scenarios that your solution is likely to encounter.

5. Targeting One Location to Run Tests

Many teams, due to budgetary reasons or technical reasons run their performance tests from inside the firewall. But to be honest, that truly doesn’t give you the measure of what kind of performance you are going to get when you application is launched or being used in the real world. Instead opt for a collection of technologies that allow to distribute your tests into the cloud and then actually get a measure of what kind of network inactivity you are going to experience once your solution goes live.

Testing will exist as long as the software exists and for this an ideal testing is vital as good testing has always been centered on the business outcomes. It’s not just about finding bugs, running tests etc. but the impact on the end user or customer. The real world should be able to have a good experience with complete satisfaction. So avoid mistakes and create error free solutions.