Objective And Importance Of Performance Testing

As the name implies, performance testing is all about testing the speed, reliability and competency of any software program, application, network or hardware device. Performance testing can also test the ease-of-use or smoothness of navigation. It helps to understand whether the system is optimally using the resources or not. This comprehensive method of testing involves several functionalities and is not limited to a specific component or function, but can be conducted across the system in conjunction with other functionalities.

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From the perspective of end users, performance testing incorporates benchmark trends to improve the performance of software application. Apart from functional testing, desired quality requirements also play significant role in determination of success of software applications. Performance test cases are designed to ensure that the software is flexible enough to pass the standard of stress and load parameters. Performance test can determine the responsiveness of software application and measure the software response time or MIPS (millions of instructions per second, the unit of software response to the instruction time). The qualitative attributes of performance testing to evaluate and establish performance overview of software solution are scalability, reliability and interoperability of the product.

Reasons For Performance Testing:

Major reasons for the software industry to rely on performance testing are:

• Performance is the key indicator of product quality and the consideration factor for acceptance in the highly dynamic and competitive IT market.


• Customers’ demand for improved quality and their vision on performance objectives.


• Now-a-days customers look for greater speed, efficacy, scalability and endurance for all applications, be it multitier application, client server application or web based application.


• It is also required to identify and eliminate the factors which inhibit performance during early developmental cycle. It is a judicious idea to initiate performance testing effort from the beginning of development project and to continue the activity till final deployment.

Objectives Of Performance Testing:

Performance testing is conducted to reach the following goals:

• To analyze the root cause related to common and uncommon problems of performance testing and to plan how to handle the issues.


• To reduce the response time of application for minimum investment for hardware system.


• To identify the problems causing the malfunctioning of system and to fix them long before the production run. Remedies of the problem related to later stages of production costs higher than usual.


• Benchmarking is needed for different applications for refining the existing strategy of the company for acquisition of software in future.


• To assure the conformation of new system for the specified performance criteria.


• To compare among the performance of two or more systems.

Different Aspects For Efficient Performance Testing:

• The documents for performance testing involve details about the present performance of the system, which act as effective baseline for regression testing also. These documents can be used to compare the expectations for changing system condition.


• Test beds and test environment for performance testing should be separate and should replicate the live production environment as much as possible.


• Performance testing environment should not be coalesced with the development environment.


• Systematic and meticulous planning is required for fulfillment of testing objective.

Ideal performance testing is able to measure the end to end performance and customer experience for a software application. Processing time, optimum consumption and utilization of resource, system endurance and overall system health should be monitored from time to time for performance testing. The task of performance testing should be assigned to skilled professionals to achieve the maximum benefit from it.

Summary:

Performance testing not only measures the performance detail of a software system, but also identifies the root cause of the problems and their remedies. This is required for optimum functionality of a software system.