What’s Perfromance Testing ?

Functional Testing is great for your software, but it isn’t enough, also needs performance testing, Performance testing is one of the most important non-functional tests in the software industry, to make you avoid planned and unplanned situations after launching your software.

Performance testing tests the application in certain situations, some of them are predictable and some of them aren’t predictable,  it’s predictable that the number of users of your application will reach X number in certain data and time, but in some situations, the number might reach an unpredictable number so it may cause some performance issues for your application.

Formally performance testing is defined as “Testing practice performed to determine how a system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It can also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.”

 

Let’s discuss more the tested attributes of your application under performance testing

Time Behaviour: It examines the taken time that software takes to process your request or to return a response and it’s so critical factor for users, statistics show that the ideal response time is between 0 to 4 seconds.

Resource utilization: It’s important for some applications to check their resource utilization like the allocation of limited RAM.

Capacity: it measures the number of users of the value of data

 

Performance testing isn’t only one type of testing that is performed, There are different types of performance testing Load Testing, Stress Testing, Spike Testing, Endurance Testing, Volume Testing, and Scalability Testing Each one of them test a situation that your software might have.

Load Testing

This is one of the most important tests for your software, it measures the performance of your software while increasing the number of concurrent users or processes.

Stress Testing

Stress testing is like Load testing but we are trying to find the situation where the system will crash to define the bottleneck of the system or the cause root of a system crash, we are to simulate for example one million users even if we know that the number of users will not reach the one million.

Spike Testing

Spike testing is for testing the sudden increase in the number of users then the application return to the normal state, so you can determine whether the application will be able to face such situations or not.

Endurance Testing

Endurance testing measures the time frame that the application can endure the load on it, it’s also as known as soak testing.

Volume Testing

Volume testing is also as known as flood testing, it’s all about testing the application under a huge number of data.

Scalability Testing

Scalability Testing is defined as one of the software applications to measure its capability to scale up or scale out in terms of any of its non-functional capability. Performance, scalability, and reliability testing are usually grouped together by software quality analysts.

 

So if you are serious about your performance testing, there are different tools that would help you like LoadNinja , Apache JMeter, WebLOAD, LoadUI Pro, LoadView all you need to know more about each tool and define your non-funcnctional requirements well, so you can select the best tool for you.