#applicationperformancetesting

Any software released into the market should fit into the crucible of customer acceptability with respect to attributes such as reliability, responsiveness, and stability. Designing and developing such high-performing software applications is a continuous challenge for enterprises due to their complexity and changes in customer preferences. In a day and age of powerful ERP software being deployed by enterprises to run their operations, connect with their clients, vendors, and end customers, and develop and deliver products or services, ensuring their quality on a continuous basis has become a challenge of sorts. Thanks to digital transformation, there is a thrust towards developing innovative software products that are competitive and capable of monetizing the business value of speed. This can often leave enterprises to ignore the crucial aspect of testing, thereby leaving the software applications vulnerable to failure.

As per the CPSQ report of 2020, the total cost of poor software quality in the United States alone amounted to a whopping $2.08 trillion. The number of software failures is staggering and increasing at an alarming rate. These pertain to ransomware attacks and IT outages, including data breaches affecting millions of customers worldwide. Most software failures happen due to the presence of bugs, ambiguities, unexpected use of software tools, and carelessness – in short, a lack of sufficient testing.

Enterprises, in a bid to attract customers, often resort to adding new features to their websites or applications without taking recourse to comprehensive testing procedures, especially performance testing. The results are obvious, with the applications not being able to perform optimally when subjected to increased load thresholds. These are most evident in the Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales when customers reach out to the e-commerce software portals in droves. Due to lack of application performance testing, many e-commerce companies end up losing money when the software stutters, shows latency, or worse, fails to take the excess load. For instance, big retailers such as H&M and Costco grappled with downtime lasting more than ten hours. However, for most e-commerce players, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales largely went without glitches, especially during the pandemic.

According to Forbes, Cyber Monday raked in revenues of $10.8 billion thanks to enterprises learning from past mistakes and preparing well in advance. Some of the websites, namely, Walmart, Apple, and Victoria’s Secret, delivered optimal user experiences with a load time of below 2 seconds, a remarkable feat indeed. These examples show how the application of a robust performance testing strategy can work wonders, especially when it counts. So, for any performance testing company, the remit is clear – ensure the software meets the requirements of stability, speed, and responsiveness under workloads to deliver a positive user experience.

It is by considering typical parameters such as data transfer rates, processing speed, network throughput, reliability, and workload efficiency that enterprises can ensure the development and delivery of high-performance software quickly. Also, performance engineering can be integrated into the development life cycle of a software product to ensure the performance parameters, namely, latency, throughput, or memory usage, are met. It helps to identify possible glitches or bottlenecks in the software or system, including scalability issues, before deploying the product.  

What can comprehensive performance testing deliver?

When the stakes are high, especially with high workload scenarios, any performance testing company needs to take a result-oriented performance testing approach to detect and fix communications and computing bottlenecks within a software system. This type of testing can help identify the location or nature of any performance-related issue that can otherwise cause the software to fail or show latency. For e-commerce companies, this form of testing can prepare them to face a major event such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, as evident in the recent instances mentioned above. The types of performance testing to be executed by enterprises can include stress testing, load testing, spike testing, soak testing, capacity testing, and scalability testing.  

What are the metrics used in a performance testing methodology?

The performance metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), can help enterprises evaluate the performance of their software applications and systems. These may include:

Throughput: The amount of information a software system can process over a specific time period. It is mainly dependent on the available processing power of the system’s components.

Memory: The storage space available for processing a piece of information in real-time. So, the less memory space, the less information gets processed, leading to poor response time.

Latency or response time: It pertains to the time lag between a user’s query and the system’s response. So, the greater the time lag, the greater the latency.

Bandwidth: The quantum of data moving across a network and between workloads per second.

CPU interrupts per second: The number of interruptions from hardware components a process receives every second.

How to execute performance testing

The generic process of executing performance testing services is mentioned below:

Define a test environment: At the outset, the test and production environments should be clearly defined, including the tools to be used.

Configure a test environment: Get resources to build the test environment and implement it for testing.

Define the performance criteria: The performance testing goals and metrics should be identified before proceeding with the actual testing process. It is against such metrics that testing should be conducted and outcomes verified.

Plan a test: Write test cases in accordance with the performance metrics and test all user scenarios.

Actual execution: Performance testing should be executed – manually and automatically with proper monitoring.

Analyze, report, and retest: Document the test results and analyze them for failed tests. After fixing the glitches, retest to see if the performance has improved or decreased.

Conclusion

Performance issues can mar the credibility of any software application and the company releasing it. These should be duly mitigated before releasing the product in the market. So, effort should be made to conduct a comprehensive application performance testing exercise to ensure optimal performance and the delivery of superior user experiences.  

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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.

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.