QA Design Gurus: Performance Testing

Performance Testing - Introduction

Performance testing is performed to determine product behaviour under various workload conditions and identify feature improvement over previous versions. Its main purpose is to monitor product responsiveness, scalability and throughput under different workload environment.

Why to do Performance Testing?

Goal of performance testing is not to find defects in the application, its main goal is to set benchmark and standard behaviour for the application.

More reasons for conducting performance testing:

Identify throughput of the application
Identify system tuning for better performance
Find the source of performance problems
Identify application behavior under multiple systems or in different system configurations

Different performance testing techniques:

Performance Test- A performance test is any test that measures stability, performance, scalability and/or throughput of application.
Load testing - Testing conducted to understand the behavior of the application under a specific load.
Stress testing - It is executed to find the upper limit capacity of the system.
Capacity Testing - This tests how many users/concurrent transactions your application can handle without losing performance benchmark.
Soak/Endurance testing - It is performed to determine the system performance under continuous expected load. During soak tests the parameters such as memory utilization is monitored to detect memory leaks or other performance issues.
Spike testing - In this testing number of concurrent users using application is increased suddenly by a very large amount and measuring the performance of the system. Aim of this testing is to find if the system will be able to sustain the workload.
Smoke Testing - This testing is done to determine application behavior under very low load. If the test fails and no further testing is necessary until the simplest test passes successfully.