What is performance testing?

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Performance Testing

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Introduction

• Although, work around a software product starts
  from ideation, it doesnt necessarily end at
  development there is more to it. Even before it
  reaches the market and makes itself available to
  users across borders, the software has to go
  through rigorous testing conducted on its various
  aspects to see how it performs. In the extremely
  cut-throat competitive world, if the newly
  developed software fails to perform to its
  optimum level, it will meet rejection at once. In
  the present fast paced life, users prefer
  software that makes life easier and quicker for
  them.
• In case, a software product fails to respond
  within fraction of seconds, it can be considered
  a performance issue and hence, will receive a
  toss. With so many software products competing
  against each other to gain prominence among
  users, one that doesnt match up to todays speed
  and causes delay in their response time will soon
  become obsolete. In order to ensure that your
  software doesnt meet this fate, performance
  testing is very much essential.

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What is Performance Testing?

• Performance of a software accounts for its
  functionality, usability and scalability levels
  under real life stress situations. So, while
  testing, an effective methodology is to be
  adopted to predict system behavior and its
  performance when exposed to varying levels of
  catastrophe. Such situations often lead to
  failures and slowdowns, which have a crippling
  effect on the overall productivity of the
  software, resulting in the ensuing driving away
  of customers and ruining the brand name and value
  of the company. For instance, you release
  software into the market without conducting
  performance tests on it and this software fails
  to respond properly under stressful situations in
  real life. Users will soon get either annoyed or
  disappointed using it and will not only give up
  on using the software, but also spread the word
  that it is a product not worth using. Since, you
  are the owner of that software your business
  earns a negative reputation in the market, which
  makes future users think twice before trying any
  software you roll out. To avoid all these
  negative scenarios, performance testing of
  software is necessary, to the point that it has
  now become unavoidable.

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Key Functions Involved in Performance Testing

• When a software product is put to performance
  testing, the team responsible for conducting the
  entire test will identify and get in touch with
  vital business and technical contacts for that
  project to get a detailed know-how of the
  software and its architecture. Once that is
  clear, the testing team will focus on recognizing
  potential performance bottlenecks in the early
  stages of SDLC and chalk out areas that run
  risks. Based on their understanding, they will
  come up with an all-comprehensive performance
  testing strategy taking services, testing and
  automating scenarios, tools to be used, reporting
  protocols, and testing environments into its
  ambit.

• With this strategy in place, the performance
  testing team will generate scenarios and scripts
  to come up with quantifiable, reliable load and
  stress tests that can be easily repeated.
  Emulating user loads, production environment,
  business patterns and future growth predictions,
  these teams can execute load testing to check
  response time and resource utilization to detect
  issues. Analyzing the results, the teams can
  recommend performance tuning to speed up response
  times and evade bottlenecks of resources. Even
  these can be followed up by creation of
  customized reports to suit particular projects
  and its interests for stakeholders and execution
  of trend analysis to spot problem areas related
  to scalability with possibilities of negative
  impact on the software in the future.

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Challenges in Performance Testing

• Creating the appropriate infrastructure to
  simulate the end user environment happens to be
  one of the major challenges encountered by
  performance testers. The challenge becomes more
  severe when the simulated environment has to be
  created at short notice, enabling it to scale up
  and down easily. In an effort to achieve a high
  end infrastructure, often the resultant process
  becomes time-consuming and expensive. This can be
  easily handled by integrating performance testing
  framework with cloud. Leveraging the cloud,
  performance test scenarios can be dealt with
  successfully.

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Performance Testing Tools

• Some of the most popular performance testing
  tools include
• HP Load Runner
• Microfocus Silk Performer
• IBM Rational Robot and Quantify
• Compurware QA Load
• JMeter QAIT IP on Jmeter

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Performance Testing Differentiators

• With these tools, supporting frameworks and cloud
  computing technologies, the performance testing
  team can create realistic load simulations to
  work in all operating systems and browsers. This
  enables a wider test coverage area at
  considerably lower costs.

• Attaining the perfect blend for performance
  testing can be tricky. However, here are some
  differentiators that can provide effective
  solutions to such testing. Say a team of
  experienced performance engineers who boast of a
  little bit of knowledge and practice of product
  development, capacity management and years of
  testing/tuning performance of software products
  can handle such testing efforts easily.
  Similarly, having cloud based test labs that
  allow flexibility and scalability management, are
  of great help to a team as well. These labs allow
  you to simulate traffic akin to different
  geographies of the real world, involving minimum
  costs. On the other hand, developing internal
  frameworks based on open source tools such as
  JMeter can help in reporting and monitoring
  performance testing of a system effectively.
  Using such open source or licensed performance
  engineering tools, a testing team can ensure end
  to end performance engineering experience for you.

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Thank YouThis powerpoint has been created by QA
InfoTech. Choose QA InfoTech as your Automated
testing partner. Visit www.qainfotech.com for
more information.