Six best practices for better performance testing

Software performance testing is a means of quality assurance (QA). It involves testing software applications to ensure that they will perform well under the expected workload. Features and Functionality supported by a software system is not the only concern. A software application's performance like its response time, do matter. The goal of performance testing is not to find bugs but to eliminate performance bottlenecks

In this post, I would like to explain some performance testing best practices that go beyond the limits of performance testing and prepare a tester to accept broader challenges than the regular testing.

Build a Complete Test Strategy

Performance testing requires lots of planning and preparation before the actual execution. You have to know your physical test environment, production environment and what testing tools are available. Understand details of the hardware, software and network configurations used during testing before you begin the testing process. It will help identify possible challenges that testers may encounter during the performance testing procedures.

Identify the Performance Bottleneck

It does not matter whether you are an experienced tester or a fresher. Whenever an issue occurs, it is very important to start with individual components rather than focusing on the whole module. Although this is time consuming, it will save you a lot of efforts and time.

Plan & design performance tests

It is always good to conduct testing under the same conditions and see if the problems persist. This continuous observation will help you to build your own filtering system for performance issues. It is necessary to simulate a variety of end users, plan performance test data and outline what metrics will be gathered.

Configuring the test environment

Prepare the testing environment before execution. Also, arrange tools and other resources.

Emphasize on Baseline Tests

You should take baseline tests necessarily because most of the errors are determined during these baseline tests. From this testers can easily identify and isolate problems during initial baseline tests because it gets difficult later on to isolate them.

Implement test design, Run and Analyze
You need to create the performance tests according to your test design, execute and monitor the tests and analyse the test results.

These are a few factors that we need to follow before going to performance testing and automation strategy apart from the regular technical aspects that you already know.