When is performance testing done

It depends on what performance indicators the business considers most important. Identify the production environment, testing environment, and testing tools at your disposal. Document the hardware, software, infrastructure specifications, and configurations in both test and production environments to ensure coherence.

Some performance testing may occur in the production environment but there must be rigorous safeguards that prevent the testing from disrupting production operations. Determine the constraints, goals, and thresholds that will demonstrate test success.

The major criteria will be derived directly from the project specifications, but testers should be adequately empowered to set a wider set of tests and benchmarks. Think about how widely usage is bound to vary then create test scenarios that accommodate all feasible use cases. Design the tests accordingly and outline the metrics that should be captured. Configure the testing environment before you execute the performance tests. Assemble your testing tools in readiness. Consolidate and analyze test results.

Share the findings with the project team. Fine tune the application by resolving the performance shortcomings identified. Repeat the test to confirm each problem has been conclusively eliminated. Create a testing environment that mirrors the production ecosystem as closely as possible. Performance testing and performance engineering are two closely related yet distinct terms.

Performance Testing is a subset of Performance Engineering, and is primarily concerned with gauging the current performance of an application under certain loads. To meet the demands of rapid application delivery, modern software teams need a more evolved approach that goes beyond traditional performance testing and includes end-to-end, integrated performance engineering. Performance engineering is the testing and tuning of software in order to attain a defined performance goal.

Performance engineering occurs much earlier in the software development process and seeks to proactively prevent performance problems from the get-go. Testing tools vary in their capability, scope, sophistication and automation. You may need to take this approach that entails performance engineering throughout development when:.

Can we definitively claim that one approach is better than the other in every instance? We need both approaches in different stages of our development cycle. We should start early by doing performance engineering and we also need to simulate load for acceptance testing.

And, in reality, the two approaches are not all that different. Both require the same use of people, technology, and processes, but they slightly vary depending on how far along in development you may be. At Abstracta, many of our clients come to us asking to take the waterfall approach, with the intention of running load simulations and acceptance tests before go-live of a new version of their system or after making a change to their architecture, etc.

Other clients have taken the performance engineering route, such as the e-commerce giant, Shutterfly, who runs performance tests continuously. This enables them to have a continuous integration environment, releasing updates frequently in order to enhance the user experience without allowing performance degradations. If you are looking for more support, check out our other performance articles or contact one of our consultants today to start performance testing.

What are your experiences with the two approaches? Why Performance Testing is Necessary. Thanks for sharing the article. In agile Shift Left approach i must say that you will need more resources in order to implement and maintain shift left engineering process.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. When taking into account the performance of existing systems or ones built from scratch, teams have to determine at what point in the development process they are going to benefit most from running performance tests.

So, the purpose of this post is to answer the question: Should we start performance testing at the beginning, alongside development taking the Agile approach or at the end the Waterfall approach? Therefore, it is important that we check both the user experience the perceived response time, or the velocity and how stressed the servers are. Furthermore, if we only pay attention to response times, we could only be seeing symptoms when what we really want to find are the underlying root causes in order to identify those bottlenecks and then the ways in which we could improve.

Now, back to the question at hand: Should we take the Waterfall or Agile performance testing approach? To clarify what we mean by the two, the Agile approach is when we start performance testing at the beginning of the development process and continue with it along with the whole evolution of the application.

The Waterfall approach is when we leave all the performance testing activities for the end of development, as acceptance testing, checking that the system performs as needed. In this approach, we usually wait until the end of development to start testing.

The performance tests take the form of acceptance testing and if the criteria are met, the system is ready to go into production. This involves simulating the expected load scenario. It is easier to plan and assign resources for performance testing since you are only doing it for a designated period of time. Typically, you try to use a test environment as similar to that of production as possible, which is beneficial because it is more realistic. It allows for the focus on specific characteristics to test like X amount of functionalities under a specific context.

There is a high risk that comes with waiting to assure performance at the very end, because you never know how much work you will have in front of you to go back and fix things in order to reach your performance goals. The Agile approach to performance testing entails starting testing from the very beginning with unit tests. It is key to have a continuous integration environment in place and what happens is that instead of merely carrying out performance testing, we carry out performance engineering.

Minimize risk. Learn about best practices as you go and over time, continuously improve. When you start testing early, if you do something wrong, you have time to catch your mistake and avoid making it again. Problems may arise if you automate too little or too much at certain levels. Be aware that you will have to ponder what a performance unit test is in your case.