In the epoch of a huge variety of mobile, web and desktop applications, each and every product have to be perfect and satisfy all needs of its users, especially when the audience reaches thousands of active users working with it at the same time. That’s why developers devote much attention to performance testing and allocate it as the important stage in the quality assurance of any software product.

In this article, you will discover basic performance testing concepts and will consider the world of testing a little deeper.

What is performance testing?

Performance testing is a set of testing types, aimed to recreate user queries to the system, and compare expected results with obtained indicators, as well as to determine the speed of procedures, stability, reliability, and scalability of the system as a whole. The obtained results allow to find vulnerabilities with app throughput, load time, processing of large data volumes and prevent them in the app.

Performance testing importance

When ignoring the performance testing before launching the product, businesses lose a high number of users and are forced to spend significant costs on the further fixing of bugs. To avoid the risks of app fails, it is essential to test the following factors:

• System response time
• Unexpected load conditions
• System scalability
• Spike user loads
• System stability
• Throughput level
• Optimise performance.

Only after ensuring that all these stages are accomplished, you can minimise the performance problems and failures of your solution.

Performance testing issues

As practice shows, the most common app performance issues are load and response time:

• Load time measures the time of starting the app, with increasing users load or transactions. Received indicators, usually, should not exceed 5-10 seconds.
• Response time determines the time from the request of execution certain processes or transactions, to receiving the response. The lower time, the better performance.

This concepts in performance testing directly affect the app conversion, as well as whether the user remains in the app or leave it.

Performance testing types

Performance testing implies the use of different testing types, directed to detection of various vulnerabilities. Here are the main of them:

• Performance test determines application scalability, speed and stability characteristics under different load intensities. It measures response time, throughput, and resource-utilisation levels.
• Load test helps to identify the performance of the system under a user load in a certain period. At this stage, you can make sure the app works perfectly independently from workload increases and a number of transactions being processed.
• Stress test checks system behaviour on the upper capacity limit load and beyond its possibilities. In this way, it is possible to find out what components will fail first in extreme conditions and whether the system is able to recover from stress.
• Spike test is similar to stress test, but the load volumes are increasing substantially in short periods of time. This performance testing type helps to determine system’s possibility to sustain sudden user loads.
• Soak testing checks system’s working capacity for a longer duration of time. The main goal of this testing type is to prevent memory leaks or problems with hardware and servers.
• Capacity test determines the optimal number of users for the smooth system operation. It helps to avoid the overflow of users base or amount of information.

Implementing this testing types throughout the application development lifecycle can increase the profit from 7% to 12%, as they are aimed at building effective and productive user interaction.

As you can see, performance testing is a vast area with dozens of concepts and directions for researches. It allows not only to track the work of the loaded system as a whole but also helps to give recommendations for optimising the operation of its modules. To achieve the best results, QAwerk software testing company is always ready to provide you with high-quality performance testing services to prevent failures in work of any software product and to ensure the stable functioning of all its components.

Written by Redwerk