5 Ways to Plan Application Performance Testing

Today, businesses think that delivering a complete digital experience is more than just page speed and load times. This is why performance testing is becoming a major responsibility for software testers and they are pushed to adopt multi-layered testing approach above the regular load and stress testing schedules. In this blog, we will review 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
Start with a detailed test strategy to determine the types of tests that you need to perform to perfect the application. Performance testing requires lots of planning and preparation before the actual execution. You can always understand tests better by understanding how components interact and the user expectations from the system. The testing strategy should closely mirror the real life environment.

Try to Include Think Time in Testing
Think time is the measure of time pause taken by the typical user while working with your application. Usually this think time occurs when a user pauses to view the information playing across the screen, when they switch from one section to the other or when they apply their intelligence to surge ahead with their plans of purchase. Usually this time lag occurs when a customer stops to verify the address or credit card details or addresses. While creating test scripts, you can fix this time as a fixed time between two consequent requests or an ideal time between maximum or minimum values.

Identify the Performance Bottleneck
It does not matter whether you are an experienced tester or a novice, you can never guess when and where the next performance issue may crop up. Hence, 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 money.

Learn from Earlier Experiences
Performance issues do crop up and it does take time to figure it out. 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. A good attribute of a keen observer is that he tries to analyze his own testing decisions over time and use that experience to get to the root of the problem.

Emphasize on Baseline Tests
Needless to say, time management is an important aspect of any performance testing project. You should take baseline tests seriously because 85% of the errors are determined during these baseline tests. This will help to save time on “full load tests”. Testers can easily identify and isolate problems during initial baseline tests because it gets difficult later on to isolate them.

These are a few factors that you need to keep in mind before outlining a performance testing automation strategy apart from the regular technical aspects that you already know. If you still feel that you need to beef up your performance testing, check out the Performance Test Accelerator (PTA) developed by Cigniti. PTA helps businesses to address challenges of performance testing in terms of infrastructure, user loads and heterogeneous IT systems.

Call us at +1 610 768 7736 to discuss comprehensive possibilities of performance testing services.