What is Performance Testing Software Engineering? First and foremost, a performance test can be either automated or manual. Automated is more preferable since it requires less effort from the person designing the test and the test itself is much faster. But there are certain needs that require a manual performance test to check load patterns, stress tests and other conditions. Performance Testing Software Engineering basically consists of designing software testing with performance considerations in mind by measuring response time or throughput parameters under various workloads. Though it may appear difficult and dry, it’s not as simple as taking a cup of coffee to work.
Is your software engineering team using performance testing as part of their testing framework? Here are five reasons why we think you should, and how to start.
Website and web application performance plays a vital role in any business. From user experience to conversion, a high-performing website or application can make a difference between growth and revenue loss. Companies use performance testing and performance engineering to ensure their websites, web application, and web services, like APIs, are optimized for reliability, performance, and stability, ultimately providing a great experience to users. Performance testing and performance engineering might sound and appear to be the same, but they are not. In this blog, we will look at both concepts in detail and explain how you can utilize them to enhance your website/application performance.
What is Performance Testing?
Performance testing of websites, applications, and APIs is done by simulating a varying number of end users, called load, to check the performance for speed, stability, scalability, accessibility, and responsiveness. The entire goal of performance testing is to detect system bugs and bottlenecks and eliminate them with the help of reports generated from the testing.
Performance testing is crucial to be performed before making your website or application live to determine the user experience with the expected number of users. By doing so, you can avoid unnecessary downtime and provide expected performance to users. The following list includes the fundamental types of performance tests.
- Load testing. Load testing seeks to determine website or application performance under normal and higher-than-normal traffic conditions.
- Stress testing. Stress testing is like load testing, however, instead of testing at normal or peak traffic levels, the goal of stress testing is to push the application or website to the breaking point to gain a better understanding of how the system responds and recovers.
- Scalability testing. Scalability testing is used to show how an application performs at minimum and maximum load levels. Once the maximum level is found, teams need to determine whether to make capacity improvements to handle the growing numbers of users or possibly being ok with slower response times once a specific number of users is reached.
- Spike testing. Spike testing tests extreme high and low levels of load to see how the system handles varying traffic levels.
- Volume testing. Volume testing tests applications with a specific amount of data to see how the database responds. Sometimes this is also known as flood testing. These types of tests are useful for scenarios where there are high levels of transactions being made, such as for financial transactions or airlines that take in large volumes of tickets and registrations, for example.
- Endurance testing. Endurance testing, also known as soak testing, is used to determine how an application performs under high load levels for an extended period, such as hours or days.
Based on the type of performance tests you are doing, you will need to adjust your load, duration, and test scenarios to get accurate reports. The test load needs to be as realistic as possible for correctly identifying bottlenecks and performance issues.
Who Does Performance Testing?
A performance test engineer is typically the role that is responsible for carry out performance testing. They make use of various performance testing tools, either on-premises or cloud-based, and take actions on their observations. They might engage developers in fixing some bugs and working on website optimizations based on the performance testing reports.
What is Performance Engineering?
Performance engineering is a discipline of using best practices and applying techniques in all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC) to ensure that the final product is optimized appropriately. The activities involved in the performance engineering focus on good architecture design, better UI/UX design, better code structure, and understanding business use cases to build the system with industry standards and high performance.
Performance engineering demands the involvement in each stage of SDLC to identify stage-specific problems and causes while designing the system. This makes the performance testing a culture within the development framework to apply techniques and incorporate industry standards to achieve a stable, scalable, and performance-optimized system.
Who Does Performance Engineering?
A performance engineer is responsible for proactively defining the industry standards and techniques to build the system and then verify the performance within each development stage. The performance engineer suggests better architecture, code profiling, database optimization, analyze business cases, monitoring, tuning, and performance forecasting.
Performance Testing vs. Performance Engineering
Performance testing and performance engineering are closely related, but there are a few key differences between them. While respective engineers are both make use of performance testing results, the way they think, analyze, and go about their tasks are different. For example, a performance test engineer looks for the response time when your website or application undergoes a certain load and directs the development team to optimize it.
On the other hand, a performance engineer analyzes why and how the response time has a certain value. They then try to find the solution that can be used as a guide by the development team to build a performance-optimized system. Let’s look at a few key differences between both.
- Performance testing involves designing test cases and executing them by performance test engineers to determine website and application performance. Performance engineering requires the active involvement of performance engineers in the SDLC for building a high-performance website or application.
- Performance testing uncovers bugs and bottleneck issues and provides analysis reports to developers for resolution. Performance engineering is taking performance concerns to the next level by helping developers to meet business case requirements and industry standards for speed, scalability, and sustainability.
- Performance testing makes use of lots of tools and is only concerned about if the website can sustain a given amount of load with baseline performance. Performance engineering is a culture and use of best practices to ensure the system is built for high-performance and exceed the performance expectations.
- Performance testing can be performed without the need for coding and programming skills using some cloud-based tools. Performance engineering requires good programming skills to define best practices in each stage of SDLC.
Types of Testing
In the last blog post I wrote about performance, scalability and the importance of performance testing in the cloud era. So, now, let us take a closer look at the performance testing methods.
It is needless to say that some of the types of testing are not really special when it comes to a cloud environment, but others are especially interesting.
Load Testing
Load testing is sort of the simplest form of performance testing. You induce a normal or expected workload to a system under test and observe it. You can use load tests to determine general system behavior, latency and throughput. In general load tests are used to verify your quality criteria.
Stress Testing
Stress testing is basically a load test, but we are applying a higher-than-expected workload and see how the system behaves under serious stress and when exceeding the design limits. You want to learn when your system breaks and how it starts to fail when being in a serious traffic situation.
A typical approach is to steadily increase the load to see where the system under test begins to violate its non-functional requirements. You can use this “tipping point” to describe the capacity of the given system, like “we can handle 1000 concurrent users per application server before we start to violate our quality requirements”.
Scalability Testing
With scalability testing you are changing the perspective to answer the question: How effective can I grow? You can run a series of stress tests and gather data on how effective you really are.
Using stress tests in a series where you steadily increase the system’s resources, you can easily tell if your system can translate this into additional capacity.
Knowing how well and how far your system will scale by adding resources, you can now make an informed decision: You might not need to do anything right now or you need to take action (e.g. remove bottlenecks). Or you simply add more resources to your problem to mitigate a scaling issue for the time being. Suffice to say, that this is a basic requirement for capacity planning and to do cost estimation.
Spike Testing
Spike testing can be used to determine how well your system can cope with sudden traffic spikes. It is comparable to a load or stress test, but modeled as a sudden burst of traffic. It can be a good preparation for a planned marketing campaign or an unplanned event like being featured on Reddit or Hacker News. Spike Testing can tell you if you are making good use of the elasticity of the cloud when faced with these kinds of events.
Soak Testing
Soak testing, again, is basically a load test where you hold the load over longer periods of time to look for long term effects, like memory leaks, disk space filling up, etc. The duration of a soak test depends on your situation. Usually a soak test runs for several hours.
Configuration Testing
While load, stress, spike and soak testing are not particular special when it comes to the cloud, the next testing method is one of the most interesting ones: Configuration Testing.
The perspective shifts now to looking at the changes in performance if the configuration is modified. The change might be positive, but also negative in case you want to optimize for costs (remember: Performance is resource usage per unit of work, money is also a resource). The point is that you know and can quantize the change.
Configuration can be almost anything here: your environment, services that you are using, dependencies of your software — all can be seen as configuration.
Configuration testing is, for obvious reasons, a very important tool in order to learn about the impact of a system’s environment to its performance. It is always a series of test runs where you compare and analyze the impact of multiple configurations.
Configuration Options
Now, it starts to get really interesting: We have a lot of configuration options to choose from when it comes to the cloud. These options include:
- Instance types selection (for EC2, RDS, EC, ES)
- Auto scaling configuration (Scaling Policies, Instance Launch Time, Scaling Lifecycle)
- Throughput provisioning (EBS IOPS, DynamoDB throughput, Kinesis bandwidth)
- Service usage optimization (ELB pre-warming, Index Usages)
Finally, you have approached the parts that you have more or less fully under your control, like the operating system, network stack and other kernel settings, software/web server/app server configuration, dependencies, etc. etc.
To emphasize this once more: The aim is to look for change in performance. So, you can use configuration testing to optimize for costs as well, while you know what kind of trade-off you are taking.
Availability & Resilience Testing
The last type of performance testing I will introduce is availability & resilience testing. I will only briefly touch this, because this is probably enough for one single blog article. The idea is to look at certain processes and behavior under load and check if you have covered this.
- What about deployments? Possible even with DB migrations under load?
- Ever changing, ever evolving infrastructure? Automatic scaling environments?
- Failure scenarios and failover mechanisms?
Principles of Chaos Engineering
The idea to give this its own testing category is inspired by Principles of Chaos Engineering. You most probably have checked for those points in some form of manual or automated functional testing, but did you also check for them under load? While you aren’t all Netflix and can’t do that in production, at least think about to do that in a test environment using artificial traffic.
Want to know more? Take a look at the previous article:
Which One Should You Choose?
While performance testing is essential for your websites and web applications to make sure they don’t break under expected load, performance engineering is a relatively new concept that leverages the best practices development environment for performance optimization. Many organizations adopt performance engineering with performance testing to further enhance their website/application and reduce the QA life cycle. Using both together is a good strategy that can deliver a high-performing website or application with fewer issues. And what users wouldn’t like that?
Using LoadView for Enhancing Website/Application Performance
LoadView is a cloud-based load testing tool for websites, applications, streaming media, and third-party web services that you can use for measuring different performance metrics such as response time, breaking point, server throughput, browser performance, resource utilization, etc. It uses real browsers and can run tests from multiple locations to simulate the most realistic load and generate insightful performance reports. It does not require you to have a coding experience as you can easily create test cases with its point-and-click EveryStep Web Recorder tool.
CONCLUSION
Performance test engineers can use the LoadView for measuring different performance metrics and identifying bottlenecks for optimization. They can easily uncover speed and stability issues with easy to grasp reports and recommend their suggestions for performance optimization. Performance engineers can also use the LoadView for the different SDLC stages by measuring performance and generating insightful reports under various load conditions that help identify the root cause of performance issues. Once the root causes are known, performance engineers can employ techniques for developers to follow and verify the performance using LoadView.
Performance testing for software is often a arduous task. There are so many factors involved, from performance metrics and scripts to configurations, you may feel like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. Stop! We’re going to give you some tips on how to perform better quality tests. In this article, we will look at the different methods of performance testing software engineering and step-by-step guide on how to set up and execute the testing process.