Five Best Practices to follow while Executing a Performance Test Strategy
The performance of your application is a critical factor that can determine the success or failure of the application. The moment you fall short of offering a high-performing application to your users, they will surely start looking for alternatives to the application.
To ensure a high-performing application it becomes imperative to test your application rigorously on various performance parameters. To do so, you need to have a performance test strategy to execute your performance test plan. However, just having the right strategy or having good tools will definitely not solve the problem. You need to blend this strategy with the right best practices that will help you achieve more in a short time.
This article will help you understand some of the best practices used in the industry that help in achieving high efficiency while executing performance tests.
- Focus on application users.
2. Define all performance baselines.
3. Consistently report and analyze results.
4. Test individual modules and the whole system.
5. Do not ignore outliers.
So let’s start.
- Focus on application users.
While designing a performance test strategy it is important that we know the way users are going to use the product. Our performance testing execution process depends on this. For instance, consider a situation where only two percent of users are accessing the ‘loan against property’ option in a loan application. This information can help us in prioritizing other sections of the application for performance testing. But, suppose the application is used by over 10 million users, which means two lakh users will be facing the issue if the section is not performing well. Accordingly, we need to change our performance testing strategy so that users are always satisfied while using the application.
2. Define all performance baselines
The performance of an application is always associated with a timeline as application performance keeps changing based on a number of factors like the technology used, hardware support, and other similar factors. In such situations, we need to have a performance baseline so that we can compare test results with the baseline marks. Similarly, testing is performed on different environments like production, staging, and development and we need to implement the same process of performance benchmarking in all these environments.
3. Consistently report test results.
This step is important as the results of our performance test keeps changing based on software changes, bug fixes, test data changes, hardware changes, and similar development which affect the application performance. This is why we need to consistently report the results of our tests which will help us compare and fix performance issues in a better way.
4. Test individual modules and the whole system.
Our applications are made of several units and are composed using individual systems, databases, web services, and other components. We need to test all of these systems individually and together which can help determine the cause of performance errors in a better way.
5. Test early test often.
The practice of ‘Test early test often’ is widely adopted across the industry for functional testing. However, a similar approach for performance testing should be followed to avoid testing in a haste. This approach can help reduce performance bugs in the system.
Conclusion:
In the article, we saw various best practices that you can implement to make your performance testing strategy more efficient. We also saw how it is important to take user perspective and performance baselines into account while testing the performance of your application. Apart from these best practices we also need to use the latest tools, technologies, and approaches like Agile and DevOps which can help us further to increase the efficiency of our performance testing.
Ensuring a reliable and resilient application is a must for increasing user traffic and retaining your application users. Testrig Technologies helps businesses test their applications for load, stress, endurance, spike, volume, and other parameters to deliver a responsive and high-performing application.
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