#performance testing methodology

The digital age aka industry 4.0 has been redefined by intelligent solutions that are merging the digital and physical worlds across verticals. These intelligent solutions are leveraged by organizations to enhance scalability, enable customization, realize efficiencies, improve customer experience, and achieve ROI. The Internet of Things or IoT technology is driving synergies between smart machines, industrial processes, and software applications. This requires organizations to build end-to-end systems with enhanced capabilities, driving outcomes such as product enhancement, innovation through collaboration, greater operational visibility, better equipment performance, and quicker decision making - all based on contextual data obtained in real-time.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects smart devices to the internet using sensors. It also connects such devices to digital technologies constituting big data, artificial intelligence, and wireless networks. The main objective of establishing such a network is to collate and share intelligence among devices without any human intervention. The data obtained from IoT helps organizations to analyze their digital ecosystem and pre-empt equipment malfunction, downtime, and other glitches. It gives them insights into the performance of products and how they are utilized by the users. The insights can be leveraged to enhance the differentiating features of products, create value chains, and build new business models to drive growth.

IoT helps organizations to 

Track and monitor assets in real-time with respect to their performance and availability

Analyze data from sensors for predictive maintenance

Take critical business decisions

Generate greater efficiency, enhance safety and customer experience, and create new business models and revenue streams

However, IoT can present a host of challenges, especially concerning performance testing.

Challenges in application performance testing of IoT devices

Increased complexity: Since data communication takes place between smart devices such as televisions, air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, or smartphones, they need to be considered for performance testing. However, a plethora of devices can increase the level of complexity while drawing a specific performance testing strategy. Also, recording data from mobile devices, and web browsers, among others by using a load tester is relatively easy compared to testing the above-mentioned devices without changing their settings.

Tackling the impact of factors: In IoT, factors such as network bandwidth, load, latency, or packet loss, among others can be critical when it comes to executing application performance testing. For example, if the above-mentioned factors are not tested for a web or mobile application, the same may crash.

Stateless operation: Typical software applications are connected through a sequence of steps aka context or state. However, since IoT sensors do not follow any well-defined context, the IoT applications ought to manage such context or state elements.

Diverse device interfaces: With changes in IoT devices and the addition of new ones with different connection protocols and data formats, the performance testing methodology needs to change as well. This is because every new addition would require the execution of performance testing. 

Absence of subjective feedback: In most testing procedures, data can be inserted to test the effectiveness of UI or response time. However, the same cannot be provided by IoT networks.

 The performance testing approach to tackle the challenges?

To begin with, testers should prioritize test cases, especially the key areas that can take the longest testing time. Testers must understand to choose such areas as the consequences of performance issues can be devastating for some businesses compared to the rest. Also, given the fact that a great deal of standardization has taken place in the technology field, the testers should ensure their compliance while providing performance testing services. Any updates being pushed for these devices would present challenges of security and usability. The core functionality of IoT devices should include monitoring their current status as they are connected to a network 24x7.

Implementing IoT can include devices that do not have IoT in them. These may include communication networks, instrumentation, and storage, among others. The complexity of such devices and the lack of an IoT label would require testers to first understand how the pieces would fit in the jigsaw. Thereafter, testers should streamline the complexity and communicate the importance of each device and make it work.

 Conclusion

The efficient way of driving the performance of an IoT based application is to implement a robust testing plan. It should be followed by determining the peak load factor faced by the device at any point in time. The testers should use appropriate testing tools to validate performance efficiently. By implementing performance testing, businesses can integrate IoT in their processes and achieve success.

In our digitally-connected world where companies are churning out umpteen number of products or services to be accessed over digital devices, performance becomes a sticky issue. The word ‘sticky’ has been used deliberately as the performance of a product or service depends on a host of factors. And delivering a glitch-proof product is no guarantee of its smooth performance. In fact, factors like responsiveness, network bandwidth, and others can deal a body blow to the performance of an application. Just think of an airline portal catering to thousands of transactions every second. If the portal does not follow a robust performance testing strategy and selects a threshold for load, it is likely to crash midway or show latency. This can adversely impact the user experience.

What is performance testing?

It is a form of software testing where the application under test needs to be checked for its load handling capacity. The load performance testing process determines the stability, speed, throughput, and responsiveness of an application or system when working under a load. It is a non-functional testing that comprises various tests such as load test, capacity test, scalability test, soak/endurance test, volume test, and spike test.

To build the right performance testing strategy, one must be aware of the associated challenges. These include 

Testing the software under realistic scenarios

 Picking the right tool to simulate real users

Lack of test data

Limited test coverage area

Poor scalability not allowing the handling of concurrent tasks

Poor network configuration

Insufficient hardware resources like low performing CPUs

Insufficient capacity to handle the workload

The performance testing methodology should define the scope, load policy, and SLAs surrounding the application. Since everything about the software cannot be tested, a decision should be taken to identify the specific area, feature, or functionality of the application for testing. It has been observed that around 10-15% of test scenarios contain around 75-90% of bugs. So, it is better to focus on those scenarios and mitigate the lion’s share of glitches.

 How to build the right Application Performance Testing strategy?

Selecting the right strategy would determine if the performance of the application covers all the right areas and load scenarios.

Test environment: Set up a robust test environment by identifying elements like hardware, network configurations, and test tools. This will help the QA team to identify challenges pertaining to performance testing early on in the SDLC. In fact, QA experts can have a number of options in setting up the test environment. These include:

A production system containing a smaller number of servers of lower specification

A production system comprising a smaller number of servers of similar specification

Using the actual production system or its replica

Baseline for user experience: At the beginning of conducting load performance testing, the QA testers should know the level of user satisfaction. So, it is not merely about the number of load times or responsiveness of the application. Identify a baseline for user experience that the application should be tested for.

Performance metrics: Choosing the right performance metrics is important to plan for testing. These include throughput, response time, and constraints. For example, response metrics deal with measuring the performance of an application from a user’s perspective. While volume metrics is about measuring traffic generated by the load testing tool vis-a-vis the application.

Realistic tests: Allowing umpteen number of virtual users to face a server or cluster of servers may not be the right way of measuring load in a real-world scenario. While setting up such a scenario, the focus should be on choosing the devices or environments that would be used to access the application in real-time. This is important because the traffic is likely to come from a host of mobile devices, operating systems, and browsers. Also, the realistic test scenario should vary in the test environment. This is to allow the organization to become resilient to the changing market dynamics.

Performance testing a part of Agile: Performance testing should not be conducted at the end of the development process. This makes it too late and expensive to fix glitches. So, load performance testing should be integrated with the development process a la Agile. In fact, performance engineering should be a part of the scrum and entrusted with measuring the performance of code during development.

  Conclusion

The stiff competition in the online environment has made the customers of today choosy, demanding and vulnerable at the same time. Business enterprises, with the purported aim of extending their market footprint, are launching multiple products for different user groups (based on age, gender, geography, and purchasing power). The product launches consider user preferences, predictions, and analytics to drive better customization and personalization. The rapid pace of product launches by businesses is driven by the objectives of retaining the existing customer base, adding new ones, and staying competitive.

The products should possess certain characteristics – available 24 x 7, scalable to accommodate any future growth, reliable, and intuitive. Moreover, high speed has become the new normal with customers expecting their software products to respond in milliseconds. If these were not enough, the advent of new technologies or methodologies such as DevOps, Agile, SMAC, VPN, IoT, and Big Data among others have created new challenges for enterprises to integrate them in their workflows. The challenges are mostly in terms of achieving a seamless performance of the application across digital touchpoints. The realisation has dawned upon enterprises about executing performance testing (PT) beyond the realm of load and stress testing. Let us understand how businesses can bring out the best in their performance testing strategy in an Agile environment.

#1. Performance to be the focus area: In the Agile-DevOps development and testing environment, testers should be tasked with executing a range of performance testing services. This can only be ensured should performance be included in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In other words, an application cannot reach the delivery stage unless the SLA parameters pertaining to performance are met. Moreover, a detailed test strategy should determine the test types that are needed to make the application future proof, scalable, robust, and dynamic. The test strategy should be in accordance with the real-time environment.

#2. Focus on performance engineering: Since the performance of an application encompasses non-functional requirements such as throughput, memory usage or latency, the testing team should make performance engineering (PE) its focus area, preferably at the beginning of the design phase. The test team should stay ahead of the curve by engaging with the developers. This can be done by being a part of scrum like meetings where updates related to development are planned and discussed. The test team should analyze if the updates or changes need new load or stress tests, for the team can deliver a positive outcome should it deal with such changes in a proactive manner. Moreover, the test team should build an Agile-based performance engineering framework to cater to the ever-changing dynamics of technology and market.

#3. Component-based testing: Since performance related issues can derail the functioning of an application not to speak of hitting the end user experience negatively, the test team should focus on individual components post finding the errors. The performance testing strategy should aim at isolating the erring component and dealing with it rather than looking at the overall module. AI-based automation can play an important role in driving this strategy, for the test script can zero in on the exact component causing the error or deviation of the outcome from expected lines. In the ultimate analysis, such an approach can save the organization money and effort.

#4. Optimization of technology and infrastructure: Application performance testing deals with issues such as scalability or performance of a software application when the latter undergoes integration (with legacy systems or cloud) or upgrades. Since the emphasis is more towards achieving cost rationalization, the performance engineering approach looks at embracing cloud and virtualized environments. This leads to the provisioning of on-demand resources and sharing of hardware systems. Also, in view of the popularity of Web 2.0, the front-end PT/PE should deliver personalized user experiences across devices, networks, browsers, and operating systems.

#5. Real-time tests: Since the applications will be used in a real-time environment with constraints of bandwidth, the typical PT/PE exercise should emulate a real world network. Here, virtual users shall download the software application in an environment having a weak signal strength. Thus, by simulating latency the test team can ascertain the requirement for parallel connections to achieve faster response times.

Conclusion

To sustain and compete in today’s online environment, a software application should be scalable, available, customizable, secure and predictable. However, should the application features not function according to the user expectations, the business can lose its customers - not to speak of its brand equity. It is only a robust PT/PE routine incorporated at all layers of the SDLC, which can ensure the performance to be seamless and top notch.

With businesses getting onto the online bandwagon in a big way, users have started using the online medium to access various products and services. This often leads to situations wherein a website (read eCommerce) or mobile app experiencing a sudden rush of traffic leading to consequences such as system latency, disruption, or downtime. Such an eventuality leaves the users frustrated, businesses losing their brand value, and competitors stealing a march ahead. For example, the eCommerce giant Flipkart suffered a loss in its brand image when users flocked to its site on October 6 to be a part of its Big Billion Day sale. The traffic was huge given the sales pitch promising products at a low rate of 1% of the actual selling price. So, when users responded to the call, the site collapsed with users greeted with broken links and a 404 error message.

So, what does a business do when faced with such an eventuality?

The answer lies in conducting a robust performance testing exercise beforehand. However, it is easier said than done given the number of factors businesses should keep in mind while approaching the job of performance testing.

Factors influencing performance testing strategy

#Identifying the goals: The approach of testing the performance of a system or application should be in alignment with the business goals. The QA tester should be in the know about a few things such as system architecture requirements, similarities in the test and production environments, and the type of users among others. Before testing, the tester(s) should take into account factors such as business requirements, key performance indicators, hardware architecture etc.

#Simulating the test environment: Before writing the script to test the performance of an application the real world scenarios should be simulated as well. The scenarios would include the type of users and their browsing patterns, user expectations, peak user loads, touchpoints and their impact on traffic, and technology constraints etc.

#Testing for mobile responsiveness: With mobile usage growing by the day, eCommerce and other businesses selling products or services should make their sites mobile responsive and apps robust. Efforts should be made to enhance the scalability of the sites or apps by simulating their peak user load using load generation tools. The challenges surrounding a performance testing strategy can be immense given the multiplicity of digital elements. In other words, the concerned mobile app should be tested for performance across a range of devices, operating systems, browsers, frameworks, and networks. The aim of application performance testing should be to validate each and every functionality across digital platforms.

#Testing for cloud adaptability: Cloud provides a suitable platform to test the scalability of a product or service. This is done by simulating the number of users and testing their impact on the functioning of the application. On a cloud platform, it becomes easy and cost effective to conduct application performance testing across geographies and other diverse media.

#Optimizing performance testing services: If time and cost constraints hinder the testing (performance) of an application, then select a few high volume or business critical functionalities for testing across devices and browsers. For example, since users are wont to conduct product searches more than any other form of digital interaction in an eCommerce site or app, the performance testing services should validate the same across channels. In the absence of the same, critical operations of the website or app can fail impacting the users in a negative way.

#Testing workflows across geographies: Users of a specific geographical location should not feel let down by the poor performance of a site or app. This calls for conducting performance engineering over testing to validate the software’s architecture. The QA team should see if the functionalities of the application perform well across devices and browsers. Moreover, it is important to validate the quality of an application in terms of its performance before the onset of any peak holiday season. 

# ROI: Any business website or app should generate revenue either in the short or long term. However, the same is underpinned on users receiving a great browsing experience. If the features and functionalities of a site/app perform well even when the user load exceeds beyond the normal levels, the impact can be positive on the brand.

Conclusion

Businesses should create a robust performance testing methodology to ensure their sites or apps perform to their optimum levels while witnessing a surge in the user base. This helps the site or app to gain brownie points from users and the business to stay ahead of its competitors.

Along with many online services, eCommerce too has found favour with customers due to its convenience, multiple options, and cost effectiveness. Customers are often confused when it comes to choosing one eCommerce store over others as each and every store more or less looks the same with similar features and functionalities. And among the many factors that can differentiate the leader from the rest is its performance when there is a sudden spike in the customer count. This is especially true during the holiday season when customers go on a shopping spree and put the eCommerce site or app under a lot of stress.

The sudden spike in the workload can lead the site or app to face downtime, disruption, server issues, and downright crash resulting in a bad user experience. And if not handled in right earnest, the bad user experience can lead users to move to other portals or apps by completely jettisoning the former. To salvage the situation or pre-empt such a scenario, the performance testing of the eCommerce site or app becomes important.

What is performance testing?

It is testing the responsiveness, reliability and stability of a software system when subjected to a certain threshold of workload. It checks and validates the features and functionalities supported by the software when put under stress. The application performance testing even tests the scalability of an application to ensure it meets the performance criteria when needed. A performance testing approach would include executing a range of tests such as load test, stress test, soak test, spike test, breakpoint test, configuration test, isolation test, and internet test.

Empirical evidence suggests that a dip in the performance of an eCommerce site or app can result in the following:

Decrease in customer     satisfaction

Loss in page views

Loss in conversions

Abandonment of the site

Key reasons for considering performance testing services

#1 Scalability: An eCommerce site or app should be able to function to its optimum level for a particular number of customers. The numbers should be decided after considering the possible load the site or app could experience depending on the geography, demography, range of products/services and server capacity. To ensure an eCommerce site/app functions seamlessly without facing any latency or downtime, it should undergo tests such as load and stress among others. These simulated tests will give the threshold up to which the application can handle the workload and the consequences of exceeding the same. By executing application performance testing before deploying the site or app for actual use, the stakeholders can ensure the features and functionalities of the software work to their optimum. The capacity of the eCommerce software should be scalable enough to handle the increased workload, as and when needed.

#2 Mobile optimization: The present trend among customers is to use smartphones for carrying out eCommerce transactions. So, apart from making the eCommerce site mobile responsive or the mobile app functional, it should be tested for its capacity to handle peak loads. This can be done by simulating the peak load by using a load generation software. Moreover, since a mobile works on a range of platforms, operating systems, networks, and screen resolutions, the challenge of testing an eCommerce app or site’s performance is immense. The performance testing strategy should ensure the app or site does not crash under peak load conditions.

#3 Day and service specific transactions: Certain services on the app or site are more intensive and widespread than others. For example, customers visiting an eCommerce site or app first carry out product searches. And only when they are satisfied with their search, they may end up buying one. Thus, the product search functionality should work seamlessly across browsers, devices, platforms and networks to drive conversions. The other functionalities like add to cart, payment gateway, and checkout should be validated for optimal performance as well. Also, tests should be conducted to ensure the site or app performs seamlessly on certain days of high usage (read Sundays and holidays.)

#4 Achieve ROI: The cost of building an eCommerce site or app can only be recovered if the site or app lives up to the expectations of the users. Although factors such as the pricing of products or the robustness of after sales services play an important role, the site or app should provide the best user experience. Remember, a satisfied client will spread the word around and can potentially bring more customers.

Conclusion

In view of the growing competition, business stakeholders should ensure their eCommerce sites or apps should function to their optimum. This calls for validating the features and functionalities of the site or app in handling peak workloads.