Every business needs high-performance and seamless applications (mobile & web) to increase user engagement and deliver a great customer experience (CX). Today, businesses continue to embrace DevOps to get faster releases and high-quality software that embeds continuous integration, continuous testing, and delivery. DevOps continuous testing involves functional, performance, security, and other testing methods to ensure flawless, high-quality apps. Specifically, performance testing plays a critical role in improving the scalability, reliability, and robustness of the apps before they are released into the market.

Table of Contents

1. What is Software Performance Testing?
2. What are Some of the Use cases of Performance Testing?
3. What are the Benefits of Performance Testing?
4. What are the Various types of Performance Testing?
5. An overview of performance testing in DevOps
6. Performance Testing in DevOps CI/CD Pipeline
7. Performance testing process overview
8. What are the Performance Testing Metrics to Measure Mobile App Performance?
9. Why is Performance Testing Important for Data Migration and ETL Testing?
10. Significance of Think Time in Performance Testing
11. An overview of automated performance testing tools
12. Conclusion

What is Software Performance Testing?

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method that checks the software’s speed, responsiveness, scalability, stability, and reliability. The primary aim of this testing method is to remove performance bottlenecks from the app/software and ensure seamless performance under all conditions, such as varying user loads, fluctuating networks, varying network bandwidths, etc.

What are Some of the Use cases of Performance testing?

• Checking app performance by simultaneously running multiple applications in the background

• Verifying app performance when multiple users login at the same time

• Checking app performance by suddenly increasing/decreasing user load

• Checking app performance under various types of networks, such as Wi-Fi, LAN, 3G, 4G, etc.

• Checking app responsiveness by taking into consideration the app response to user queries

What are the Benefits of Performance Testing?

1. Improves Website Speed:

Common issues like broken images, content-related issues, frequent timeouts, etc., hamper the website’s speed. This non-functional testing method helps identify and resolve these issues, thus enhancing the website’s speed.

2. Removes Performance Bottlenecks from Apps:

This software performance testing ensures that critical bugs and performance bottlenecks are removed from the software before it goes live.

3. Ensures Scalability, Reliability, and Robustness of Apps:

This testing type ensures the software is scalable and can handle users even during peak loads. It ensures the software performs well under unexpected situations like fluctuating networks, bandwidth, user load, etc. Thus, it ensures the software’s scalability, reliability, and robustness.

4. Enhances Customer Experience (CX):

End-users don’t prefer slow-loading apps and websites. This testing method helps improve the app’s performance and speed, ultimately enhancing the CX.

5. Helps to Generate More Revenue:

End-users prefer apps with seamless performance. Better app performance generates more revenue for businesses, as users prefer to download seamless apps, especially eCommerce, telecom, and healthcare sector apps.

What are the Various Types of Performance Testing?

1. Load Testing

Testers perform this testing by simulating the number of virtual users that might use the application. The principal aim of this testing method is to ensure that the application performs well under normal and peak user loads.

2. Stress Testing

This testing technique helps identify the system’s breaking point when user load exceeds the expected peak.

3. Endurance Testing

This testing helps identify any resource leakage in the system when it is subjected to normal user load for an extended duration, such as 8 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, or 48 hours.

4. Spike Testing

It is a subset of stress testing that checks the system’s behavior by suddenly varying the number of users. This testing checks whether the system can handle the change in user load. 

5. Volume Testing

This testing method performs multiple data-intensive transactions to validate the system’s performance under such data volumes.

6. Scalability Testing

This testing method determines the capability of the system to scale up in terms of user load, data volume, number of transactions, etc. The main aim of this testing method is to determine the peak point beyond which the system prevents more scaling.

7. Component-Level Performance Testing

An application comprises minor components, which are the smallest parts. In component-level performance testing, the individual components of the application are tested to ensure their effective performance in isolation. Later, all the app components are tested as a group to ensure a high-performing and fully integrated application. Further, these components are integrated, and finally, performance testing is executed after integration. 

An Overview of Performance Testing in DevOps

Businesses continue to embrace DevOps to get faster releases and higher quality in less time. This DevOps methodology promotes team collaboration to deliver faster and higher-quality releases to customers. The DevOps lifecycle includes various stages such as Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD). Typically, performance testing in DevOps plays a critical role in ensuring the release of high-quality software in less time. Moreover, performance testing in DevOps is done by integrating continuous and automated performance testing into the continuous delivery pipeline. However, to take up performance and load testing in DevOps, a series of steps should be followed at each stage of the DevOps lifecycle.

Performance Testing in DevOps CI/CD Pipeline

Performance testing in DevOps involves continuous performance evaluation at each DevOps CI/CD pipeline stage, which ensures faster feedback loops for software improvement. 

1. Code and Build Stage

DevOps performance testing starts with continuous performance testing at the build stage, which involves unit performance testing. In this stage, the smallest unit of the software is checked to ensure it performs well in isolation.

2. Integration Stage

Once the unit performance testing is is done, performance testing is done at the integration stage, where the smallest units of the software are integrated. The performance of these integrated units/modules is tested to ensure the modules’ effective performance after integration.

3. Test Stage

During this stage, system-level performance testing ensures the software performs as well as expected. Once the system-level performance tests are passed, the software moves to the release and deployment stage. 

4. Release and Deploy Stage

During this stage, load testing and real user monitoring are performed to ensure that the software effectively handles user load in the production environment.

5. Monitoring Stage

After the software reaches the monitoring stage, continuous performance monitoring is done, where various performance metrics are evaluated to determine areas that need improvement.

Performance Testing Process Overview

1. Prepare Performance Testing Checklist

Testers should prepare a performance testing checklist before starting the test. The checklist should include what is to be tested, pass/fail criteria, user scenarios, issues to be monitored, etc. Before preparing the checklist, testers need to gather the client’s requirements.

2. Plan the Test

Prepare a test plan or test strategy that covers the aim and scope of testing, application architecture, environment details, testing tools, roles, responsibilities, etc.

3. Setup the Test Environment

Testers need to set up the test environment. There are two types of test environments: on-premise and in the cloud. The test environment should be chosen wisely, as the effectiveness of the testing process largely depends on the environment in which it is executed. The load generation environment should be configured to generate virtual load for software load testing.

4. Prepare Test Data

To set up the test data, testers first need to extract and modify the data to test the software and generate enough test data to perform the tests.

5. Prepare Test Scripts, Execute the Test and Analyze the Results

This is an important step that involves the preparation of test scripts, the execution of test cases, and the analysis of test results to determine whether it passes or fails.

6. Fix the Bugs

The Dev team resolves all the bugs found during the testing process. Once all the bugs are fixed, the testing process is repeated to ensure that the defects are fixed.

7. Prepare Test Report

Document all the test findings in one place and share the test report with all the stakeholders and the project team.

What are the Performance Testing Metrics to Measure Mobile App Performance?

1. App Installation Time

This metric gives the user a first impression of the app. This metric measures the app installation time and how it can be improved.

2. App Launch Time

App launch time or app start time is another important metric that must be checked in an application. Ideally, it should not be more than 1 to 2 seconds.

3. App Background Processing

It is essential to ensure that app performance remains unaffected when multiple apps run parallelly. It is essential to ensure that no data loss should happen when the app runs in the background and is retrieved.

4. Client-Side Resource Usage

An app should not consume excess memory and must not heat the device, especially when it runs in the background. Thus, checking an app’s CPU usage and memory during its execution is essential.

5. Response Time

This metric measures the time it takes for an app to respond to a given input. Faster response time ensures less wait time and high app performance.

6. Average Load Time

The load time of app/website and page load time is very important for users and businesses. Faster loading time or speed ensures better performance of an app.

7. Bandwidth and Network Compatibility

Varying bandwidth and fluctuating networks affect the app loading time. However, to ensure effective app performance, it is essential to perform load testing of an app with minimal bandwidth and different network types and connections, such as 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-FI, etc.

8. Concurrent Users

This metric measures how many virtual users are active or accessing the app at a given time. The number of users using the app directly impacts the app’s performance.

9. Requests Per Second

It measures how many requests per second the server can handle without degrading performance or resulting in an error.

Why is Performance Testing Important for Data Migration and ETL Testing?

Data migration is a complex but essential process for every business. Effective data migration helps businesses ensure better data availability, reduced cost, improved performance, and more. However, while migrating data from various sources to a new system, it is essential to ensure that the new system’s performance remains unaffected after migration. This is where the need for performance testing during data migration comes into the picture. In this testing type, various performance tests are executed on the system before and after migration to ensure the new system’s performance is not degraded post-migration.

Performance and load testing play a vital role in the Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) process. The data is extracted from various sources during the ETL process, transformed into a consistent data type, and then loaded into the data warehouse or target system. Performance testing in ETL ensures that the ETL system can handle a high volume of transactions. Performance tests in ETL also verify the ETL system’s efficiency by determining the system’s actual time to process data. The less data processing time, the higher the efficiency.

Significance of Think Time in Performance Testing

Think time is the time difference between each user’s actions. When users visit a website, they take time to think and act. The difference or time gap between each action is known as think time.

For example, suppose a user visits an eCommerce website. The user clicks on the products tab, selects the product, reads the description, and adds the product to the cart. The time spent between clicking on the product tab to clicking on the add to cart tab is considered think time.

Think time plays a crucial role, as it represents the user’s actual behavior in the system. A user never completes all actions like login, search for a product, add to cart, payment, and log out in one go. The users take some time to complete all actions. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce Think Time in this non-functional software testing technique to create a real-world scenario in the testing environment. 

Another reason to introduce Think Time in performance and load testing is that if a tester executes software testing by making multiple requests without a pause, it will overload the server. The server also needs time to process requests and give the results. Therefore, it is essential to consider Think Time in performance and load testing.

An Overview of Automated Performance Testing Tools

1. Apache JMeter

It is an open-source tool that helps analyze and measure the performance of various web applications. This tool supports various protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, XML, SOAP, and Java-based protocols. This non-functional software testing tool requires less scripting effort than other tools and has simple charts/graphs that can be used to analyze key load-related statistics and resource usage. 

2. WebLOAD

It is an enterprise-scale load testing tool for web and mobile load testing. This tool has many features and functionalities, including Load Generation Console, Analytics Dashboard, and a comprehensive IDE.

3. Stress Stimulus

This tool is used to perform load testing of web apps, mobile apps, and enterprise apps. Stress stimulus supports on-premise or cloud load testing and works well with Fiddler. This tool comes with an end-to-end test wizard that eases the performance testing of mobile and web apps.

4. io

It is a multiplatform performance and load testing tool that allows performance testing to be added to the continuous integration process, real-time monitoring of the test environment, and analysis of test results on multiple machines.

5. NeoLoad

Neoload is a continuous performance testing tool for desktop and mobile apps. It offers great features like scriptless test creation, GUI-driven design, automated parameterization, and more. Neoload can be easily integrated with CI tools and allows real-time identification and removal of performance bottlenecks.

6. Load Runner

It is the most widely used tool for testing applications and measuring system behavior and performance under varying loads. This tool simulates thousands of concurrent users and records variations in system performance. This testing tool supports all advanced technologies, including Ajax, Flex, HTML5.0, Java, SOAP, and Citrix, along with all other legacy technologies.

7. LoadView

It is used for cloud-based load testing and helps DevOps teams test websites, web apps, and application programming interfaces (APIs) with thousands of concurrent users. This tool simulates API calls, validates API responses, and verifies the most important SLA requirements. The agile and DevOps teams can test their website’s UX under load, verify performance, and identify various bottlenecks within the applications. 

Conclusion

Performance testing is an essential element that determines the success of an application in DevOps processes. A high-performing app is the need of the hour for businesses, and a low-performing app can affect brand reputation and even the CX. Hence, a well-developed performance testing method and proper automated tools should be leveraged to get high-performing and scalable apps. Therefore, enterprises should leverage next-gen end-to-end performance testing from a specialized QA and independent software testing services provider to ensure high-performance software and accelerate time to market.