#soak testing

The performance tests you run can help make certain your software meets the expected levels of service and provide a positive consumer experience. They'll highlight improvements you should make to your software relative to speed, stability, and scalability before they enter production. Software released to the general public in lack of testing may suffer from different kinds of problems that lead to a damaged brand reputation, sometimes, irrevocably.

The adoption, achievement, and productivity of software depends upon the right implementation of performance testing.

While resolving creation performance issues can be extremely expensive, the use of a constant optimisation performance testing approach is vital to the achievement of a successful overarching electronic strategy.

When is the right time to run performance testing?

Whether it's for mobile or web applications, the life cycle of an application comprises two stages: development and installation. In every case, operational teams expose the application to end-users of the product structure during testing.

Development performance evaluations focus on components (web services, micro services, APIs). The earlier the elements of an application are analysed, the earlier an anomaly can be discovered and, generally, the lower the cost of rectification.

As the program starts to take form, performance evaluations should become more and more extensive. In some cases, they might be carried out through deployment (for example, when it's difficult or expensive to replicate a production environment in the development lab).

What are the various forms of performance evaluations? There are several distinct types of performance evaluations. The most important ones include loading, unit, anxiety, soak, and spike evaluations.

Load testing simulates the number of virtual users who may use a program. In replicating sensible usage and load requirements, dependent on reaction times, this evaluation can help identify possible bottlenecks. Additionally, it enables you to understand whether it is necessary to adjust the size of an application's architecture.

Unit Tests

Unit testing simulates the transactional activity of a practical test effort; the goal is to isolate trades that can interrupt the machine.

Stress Tests

Stress testing evaluates the behavior of systems facing peak activity. These evaluations significantly and continuously increase the number of consumers during the testing period.

Soak Testing

Soak testing raises the number of concurrent users and tracks the behavior of the system over a more protracted period. The target is to see if extreme and continuing activity over time shows a possible fall in performance levels, which makes excessive demands on the resources of this system.

Performance testing and types of performance testing such as Load Testing, Volume Testing, Pressure Testing, Capacity Testing, Soak/Endurance Testing and Spike Testing are included under Non-functional Testing

In the field of Software Testing, Testers mostly focus on Black Box and White Box Testing. Under the Black Box testing, again there are various types of testing. The significant types of testing are Functionality testing and Non-functional testing. Like I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article, Performance analyzing and testing types related to performance testing fall under Non-functional testing.

In current market functionality and responsiveness of software play an essential part. We conduct performance testing to address the bottlenecks of the system and to fine-tune the system by finding the root cause of performance issues. Performance testing answers to the questions such as the number of users the machine could manage, How well the system could recover when the no. Of users crossed the maximum users, what's the response time of this system under normal and peak loads.

We use tools such as HP LoadRunner, Apache JMeter, etc., to assess the operation of any System or Application Under Test (AUT). Let's see what are these terms in detail below.

Different types of Performance Testing:

Performance Testing:

Performance testing determines or validates the speed, scalability, or stability characteristics of the system or program under test. Performance is concerned with attaining response times, throughput, and resource-utilization levels that satisfy the performance objectives for your product or project.

Ability Testing:

Ability Testing is to ascertain how many users that the system/application can manage successfully before the operation goals become unacceptable. This allows us to prevent the possible issues in future as increased user base or increased quantity of information.

Load Testing:

Load Testing is to verify the system/application can manage the anticipated number of trades and to confirm the system/application behaviour under the normal and peak load conditions (no. of users).

Volume Testing:

Volume Testing is to confirm that the system/application can manage a large amount of data. This testing centres on Data Base.

Stress Testing:

Stress Testing would be to confirm the behaviour of this machine when the load increases more than the machine's design expectations. This testing addresses that components fail first when we pressure the system by employing the load past the design expectations. So that we may design a stronger system.

Soak Testing:

Soak Testing is aka Endurance Testing. Running a method at high load for a prolonged period of time to identify the performance problems is named Soak Testing. It is to be certain the software can handle the expected load during a long time period.

Spike Testing:

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As a tester, your job is to deliver the best possible feedback on the promptness of an application in the development cycle as early as possible. Obviously, in the real business scenario, deadlines are always tight and testing starts later than it should. There are a few simple principles that can help make your performance testing projects more effective. 

- A reasonably accurate result at present is worth more than a very accurate result later on. It is well understood that modifications become costlier later in the project. As a result, the sooner the performance issued are found, fixing them seems the easier.  

- Test broadly instead of deeply. It is better to test a broad range of scenarios in a very easy manner than to test a few test cases very intensely. In the beginning of a project, a fairly accurate simulation of the real world is all right. Time spent obtaining each test case to unerringly mimic the predicted scenario or testing many slight variations of the real world scenario is better spent a wide range of scenarios is tested.    

- Testing should be performed in a controlled environment. Testing without good configuration management and dedicated servers will yield test results that cannot be reproduced. Hence, in such a case you cannot measure the improvements correctly when the system’s next version is ready for testing. How to make a load testing program successful

Based on input from partners and customers, here’s a list of best practices that will assist load testers to make a quick start on the way to a quality load testing program.

1. Recording a script

First, find out the most frequent workflows in the application that is being tested. For an existing application, you need to identify this by checking analytics and server logs to get exposed to the most common scenarios. When you are recording, confirm that you test the application in a production-like setting, including factors like SSO, SSL, firewalls and load balancing. This is crucial for simulating exact end-to-end behaviour. You are recommended to record scripts from all of the ordinary user environments including different mobile devices and browsers.

2. Improving a script with validation and correlation

Find and replace all dynamic values in the recorded script, for instance, session-id as well as security tokens. If these values are not regenerated at the time of test execution, most of the systems will not function properly. This procedure is called Correlation.

Ensure that you stress the application’s back-end instead of only the cache servers, by restored static values in place of parameters that will be defined at run time automatically. Validation logic needs to be added to the script in order to confirm that the results obtained under load are consistent.

3. Running the load test

Create practical runtime scenarios which take into consideration the number of users, the test scripts, network limitations¸ browser types and schedule. The SLA or set of criteria should be defined for a successful performance test. Keep away from the temptation to extrapolate outcome, one server with 100 users could not run like two servers with 200 users. Testing the equivalent of your complete production stack should be performed.

4. Analyzing results

It’s imperative to verify all the application parameters along with the number of connections, transaction times, response time as well as throughput. There are several reasons why an application breaks under load and the actual cause is not always easy to predict.

Performance of the software or the finished output is a universal quality which is often affected by each aspect of its code, means for execution as well as its design. It has been found out that half of the executives in majority of the IT concerns face performance issues with respect to 20 % of the projects that they are handling. Ensuring sound performance of the software applications is crucial for the growth of the IT firms and more so in the mobile devices. The success also depends on the user experience to a considerable extent as many times poor performance leads to frustration and dissatisfaction amongst the clients.

Adoption of mobile technology is the latest as well as the phenomenon in the history that demonstrates the fastest technology adoption curve. The mobile application market is expected to experience a tremendous growth within the next few years. Sound performance of the application that are deployed to the mobile devices becomes highly significant as poor performance  often hampers the revenue levels, brand image and lead to decline in customer loyalty.

To achieve sound performance standards with respect to the software applications, performance engineering and performance testing both are crucial and needs to be undertaken. Both of these need to be optimized and used appropriately to drive great performance standards.

Performance Engineering

Performance engineering in case of Software Development with respect to mobile platforms has been observed to be one of the fastest growing areas in Software Engineering. Through performance engineering, the connection between recognition of a business and success of the application when the same is applied to mobile based software is now largely becoming apparent.

Performance engineering encompass a set of roles, activities, skills, tools, practices and deliverables that are applied at each and every phase of the SDLC that leads to ensuring that a solution is going to be designed, implemented, and finally operationally supported for meeting the non-functional requirements in case of performance like latency, throughput or even memory usage.

With the connection between the success of the application and that of the business gradually gaining recognition especially in terms of the mobile devices, performance engineering has adopted a perfective and preventive role within the SDLC.

- It is invasive and involves people from different units of an organization but chiefly within the IT company.

- It helps in increasing the business revenue by means of ensuring that the system is able to process transactions in the required timeframe.

- It helps in eliminating late deployment of the system and system rework owing to issues related to performance

- It also helps in elimination of avoidable efforts with respect to system tuning. - Performance Engineering helps in avoiding unnecessary as well as additional acquisition costs of hardware.

- Helps in the reduction of increased costs with respect to software maintenance owing to performance related problems in case of production.

Performance Testing 

In case of software engineering, performance testing is an in general and non functional testing that is carried out in order to determine the performance of a system with respect to stability and responsiveness in face of a specified workload. Often this type of testing helps in the investigation of measure, validation or verification of other attributes of a system that establishes the quality of the same like reliability, scalability and usage of resources.

- It serves a number of purposes like demonstrating of the system that fulfils performance criteria.

- It can also be employed for comparing the performance of two systems for finding out the one that performs better. It can also measure the part of a system or the specific workload that are the basic causes accounting for bad or poor performance of a system.

Performance Testing consists of a number of testing like Stress testing, Load Testing , Spike Testing, Soak Testing, Isolation testing and Configuration testing.