The fast pace life has left no room for waiting and has raised the users’ expectations to a new level. A slow working application or not giving the desired results to the end users will bring nothing to the business rather it will make competitor to appear better to the end users. So, the best way to get your application a competitive edge is doing its comprehensive performance testing.
Before we dig deeper, let us initiate with what is Performance Testing.
“Performance Testing” in simple terms can be described as a way to evaluate how well an application performs in the real world. This leads to the meaning that when it’s users are accessing it how satisfied are they with its performance; but in business terms, “Performance Testing” can be defined as a non-functional software testing approach which aims to determine the responsiveness, stability, reliability, accuracy of an application under a certain user load.
Evaluating an application’s performance requires stimulating real world scenarios with user load, which means testing the application whether it will hamper or not when its users are accessing it. Performance testing is linked up with two words “concurrent users” and “response time”; concurrent users indicate the number of multiple users accessing the application, and response time indicates the amount of time taken for a request to get response when multiple users send it. A realistic load with concurrent users on application can give you an evaluation of response time taken by the application to respond for a user’s request.
Let us take an example of a bank which has recently launched an application for their customer support and they haven’t done any performance testing before the launch, the application was not able to perform as it should when multiple customers of the bank are accessing the application for customer support service, then it will lead to an impact on the banking experience that customers are having with the bank and further leading to brand and also business. Thus, to prevent users from facing any complications in accessing the app services the performance testing of the app is crucial otherwise it could put the business’ reputation at stake.
An insight into why Performance Testing is crucial.
Staying ahead among the competitors is every business’ desire. For this reason, Performance Testing holds a high significance in the world of software testing as it could determine how well an application performs when the users are accessing it. So, this makes it important to analyze an application’s performance with varied user load levels and only after a thorough analysis if any bottlenecks are found, these are mitigated to make the app high performing one. With this, businesses can confront certain issues like load time, response time, and any other performance bottlenecks which might create hindrance in the seamless user experience which an application tends to offer to win its users.
Now let us learn about the types of Performance Tests to identify performance bottlenecks
Performance testing is a wider term which holds many branches in itself and each branch (each type of performance testing) gives different information to derive an overall insight on application’s performance. So, it becomes important to work on your application’s business goals it should achieve and finalize them before performance testing; only then performance tests directed into a right way to make the application behave in a right way to achieve business goals.
“Applying different types of perfomance tests implies to testing an application’s performance with distinct load patterns.”
Load Testing- a way to identify the application’s performance through constant increase in the load
Growth and revenue is the desire of every business for which they have different strategies to implement. Despite those strategies, they still lack in achieving the confidence and trust of their targeted audience because their applications which represent their business aren’t at the level of high performance.
Testing an application under a specific load does not assure the performance of the app rather it needs to be tested comprehensively to avoid any further disruption for end users. So, load testing acts as a way to test an application’s performance to know whether it is at the level of high performing at all user load conditions from normal to peak.
Load Testing keeps a check on the performance of your application that if it is visited by one visitor, how quickly it loads and if it is visited by some 15 or 20 people at once then how much time does it take to load. Thus, it makes sure that the application works as expected.
Load testing is a set of performance tests in which the user load keeps on increasing within a defined time duration ranging from a few minutes to few hours. Let us take an example for better clarification on this concept. Suppose, your application currently has 700 visitors and you are expecting it to be increased to 1000, so you want to know further that how will your application perform with the increased user load. For this, you cannot just directly escalate the user load to 1000 users and check how your application is performing; it’s because your application may encounter performance outages even with a user load that’s below 700 users. Thus, you need a testing approach in which you initiate the execution of performance test scripts with a normal user load and keep increasing the load at specific intervals of time until it reaches the peak.
With the above approach, you will not only know about how much maximum user load as per your expectation, your application can handle but you will also be able to identify the performance bottlenecks which your application passes through at all levels of user load. Therefore, load testing has crucial role for an application’s quality.
Stress Testing is meant to test your application for how many concurrent users it can handle before it crashes
Stress testing is other type of performance testing which examines and identifies the maximum limits of your application by testing it under extreme user load. Stress Testing also gives an insight into how your application behave under extreme user load and how your application recovers while going back to normal user load.
Stress Testing is an approach to test your application to know about the limit of traffic that becomes as hindrance for application to perform as normal or to crash. You know that your application will behave in a different way when it receives more than its usual user load and thus stress testing is required which is a kind of performance testing to focus on identifying the possible performance risks and breaking points of your application.
For instance, many e-commerce websites offers good discounts or deals on the occasion of Thanksgiving or Christmas or any other festive shopping day. If your website is not ready to handle intense user load it receives due to discounts and deals offered, then your website go crash or face a few minutes of downtime, and this could result in loss of thousands of dollars and success of your business. Therefore, stress testing becomes imperative not just for your application but also for your business.
A slight variation can make Stress Testing to Spike testing or Endurance Testing
Stress testing prolonged for a longer duration of time becomes Endurance Testing or Soak Testing. With a sudden ramp up of user load, stress testing becomes Spike Testing. Spike traffic can impact your business, so Spike Testing becomes essential for your application’s readiness for spike traffic.
“Implementing different types of performance tests ensure that you are informed with different possible performance issues which your users might come across in your application”
What ClicQA has in its basket to offer its clients with Performance Testing needs
The performance of your applications that represent your business decides the success of your business. Most of the performance issues are identified only after an application goes live, which will impact not just the business but also the brand. Moreover, no matter what best you have to serve your customers through your application, your customer will give the opportunity to serve your best when only your application performs the best. This is why a prior comprehensive performance testing is essential for your applications, to check how it works in real conditions when multiple users are accessing it.
ClicQA, an Independent Software Testing Company, offers comprehensive performance testing services which will help in identifying your application’s performance bottlenecks before your customer does. We have extensive exposure to the best performance testing methodologies and hold the vast experience in creating an appropriate performance testing solution for the clientele who has varying performance testing needs.
ClicQA Load Testing as a Service
In this digital world, need for speed is everywhere now. Your application users will not have time to wait until your application or website loads though you serve the best service or product. So, performance is the top priority for your application to convert users to customers, more load time means more chance of losing customers in this cutting edge competition. However, it is not easy to achieve as there is a need of performance testing expert.
ClicQA has built incomparable performance testing services portfolio supported with its dedicated performance testing team. ClicQA offers load testing services that suffice the requirements of the clientele to determine the app’s behavior under normal and expected user load.
How ClicQA makes a difference in Load Testing
Understanding Requirement Clearly before Load Tests are prepared
Prior to preparing the load tests, our aim is to validate functional as well as non-functional aspects of the application. Not only this, before initiating the load testing phase, we make sure to identify the scope and goal of load testing. This gives an insight to the risks associated to it and thus, we mitigate those issues to avoid chaos during load testing.
Comprehending End-User’s needs to make the Application to meet end-user expectations
How smoothly an application interacts with the end user opens the way to success for the business. Rich user interface is the key to hold more customers and to attain this adding graphics have become imperative. However, the striving to have a rich user interface is impacting the application’s performance by creating delay in the page loading. The users may not wait for delayed page load and there is a possibility to switch to the competitor. So, keeping this in mind, our load testing services focus on suggesting the essential optimizations to improve the overall performance of an application.
Expert Analysis and Recommendations to improve your application performance
After conducting a series of load tests, our performance testing team will analyze the test results and provide valuable insights so that our clientele development team can proceed further with solving the performance issues.
The Scope of our Load Testing services include
- Testing an application to obtain performance issues under a defined load.
- Limited number of executions or on demand tests are performed as per SLA.
- Obtaining performance measurements and ClicQA team assists in fixing issues.
The deliverables of our Load Testing services include
- Test Plan
- Test Artifacts
- Client side Reports
- Response time and throughput
- Depending on the requirement, we will make a detailed client side report with the defined KPIs.
- We will share the best metrics for the duration of test such as Memory, Disk, Network, CPU metrics.
Performance Engineering as a Service
Performance engineering is a broader term for those set of processes that ensures an application to perform to its fullest.
ClicQA has performance engineers, who has vast experience and in-depth expertise for performance testing and performance tuning, to deliver Performance Engineering services to clients who are looking more than load testing services.
Our Performance Engineering services add value by providing performance tuning and recommendations at application, code and database levels. With expertise in development and infrastructure components, our Performance Engineers benchmark the performance metrics aforementioned by the client; execute tests, analyze the test results, provide recommendations and again execute tests until aforementioned benchmarked performance metrics are met.
How ClicQA beats performance issues with performance engineering
The Scope of our Performance Engineering services include
- Unbound to time and ultimate performance improvement is the goal.
- The objective is more broader in it every element of architecture is carefully tested, reported, analyzed and improvements are recommended.
- End to End Continuous Agile Performance Testing Process is followed.
- Performance Tuning recommendations are provided.
The deliverables of our Performance Engineering services include
- Test Plan
- Test Artifacts
- Client side Reports
- Response time and throughput
- Depending on the requirement, we will make a detailed client side report with the defined KPIs.
- Server side reports
- We will share the best metrics for the duration of test such as Memory, Disk, Network, CPU metrics.
- If you have open source DB in your server, we will give you metrics such as response time for DB queries.
- Recommendations
- Code Tuning
- Database Tuning
- Application Server Tuning
“ClicQA Performance Testing Services do a 360° coverage for your application performance so that it delivers a satisfying user experience, further leading to business growth”