8 Steps to an Effective Performance Testing Strategy

Performance testing is the process of evaluating the capabilities of software, an application, or a website. It is done to test the responsiveness, stability, speed, reliability, size, and other important aspects of a software product. Various types of Performance Testing help the software reach set benchmarks and ensure that it delivers an expected end-user experience. Performance testing in software testing also aids in detecting bottlenecks from an early stage of development. It is an essential part of the software development lifecycle, as it ensures the software built is of high quality.

That is the reason why setting an efficient performance testing strategy at the beginning of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is very important. In this performance testing guide, you will get to discover an in-depth exploration of the process of performance testing. The process of performance testing comprises implementing various types of techniques and testing tools. These performance testing processes include various metrics like Load Time, Response Time, Maximum Requests Per Second, Peak Response time, and more. A lot of testers leverage these test strategies to identify bottlenecks or performance issues in the system of the product. The main objective of performance testing is to ensure that the software reaches its full potential and meets the requirements of the end-user experience.  

Key Objectives of Creating a Performance Testing Strategy

To create an efficient performance testing strategy, certain key objective areas need to your must paid attention to. First and foremost make sure that you have a clear-cut performance testing objective. Having a pre-defined objective or goal can help you optimize the system’s performance better. Secondly, it is important to have both quantitative and qualitative objectives clearly defined before starting the procedure. It allows you to detect bottlenecks and issues beforehand. 

Clearly defined goals of performance testing

As mentioned above, having predefined goals or objectives will define the level of ‘good’ performance in software. To ensure that, there are a few factors that you must keep in mind. They are:

Response Time: Response time is the amount of time that software takes to respond to a user request. Set a benchmark for a ‘good’ response time from both the client and the server’s perspective separately to measure the performance of the system better.

Resource Utilisation: The other aspect of performance testing is testing the resource utilisation capabilities of a software application. These resources include CPU, I/O, memory, and database utilized by the application. Set appropriate parameters, automatically, either per transaction or per operation.

Throughput: Have a predefined load to measure the system’s throughput in a given time, per second, or a prolonged period.

Workload: Have a set number of users or concurrent tasks that you want to test your software application for. 

To start the Performance Testing process, a tester must make sure that all these factors are taken care of. Once the metrics are properly set according to the benchmarks, the tester is supposed to start running the test cases multiple times on various setups. It is to be done during the deployment period to make sure that you get a practical range of acceptable values for each metric that you set. Make sure you also define the minimum acceptable values of these parameters beforehand. Another key point is to make sure you recollect all the information from the software running for a very long period. It will give you the scope of re-baselining the values of each of the parameters, which is extremely important in the process of performance testing.

Aligning objectives with overall project goals

The next key factor to pay attention to, while setting up a performance testing strategy is to ensure that the objectives are in complete alignment with the overall goals of the project. This depends on a few factors which are discussed below:

• Build a reliable application throughput
• Create test cases that are scalable under heavy loads
• Check the capacity of the software or its breaking point
• Check the functionality of software on the addition of new features
• Check the behavior of the application under various amounts of load

When you set the mentioned objectives, make sure that these objectives are in alignment with your project goals. Let’s say you are working on an e-commerce website, the robustness of the website must be decided and agreed upon from both the company’s revenue goals and the software’s capabilities.

Identifying critical performance metrics

Other critical performance metrics such as web-based or mobile-friendly, network bandwidth, size of the database, speed, transactions, etc. all of these must be pre-defined and taken care of. Apart from that, testers must make sure that the software application complies with the Service Level Agreement. Some other areas that the tester should also take care of, to make sure that the system of product is best suited for end-users are:

Operational Processes: Ensure that the time taken for environmental startups, shutdowns, backups, resumptions, etc. are not extended for longer periods.

System Restoration: The tester must know the efficient amount of time that a software must take to restore data from backup, and use that wisdom while testing a new product.

Alert or Warning: The tester must also be capable of testing the product for the amount of time it takes before issuing a warning alert.

However, please keep in mind that having more metrics than those that are required is not a healthy practice. Each metric that you choose for your software application must be used for consistent data collection and reporting. So before you start with your performance testing, make sure that you set realistic goals with the required number of metrics beforehand. 

To have an in-depth understanding of how is it that you can strategize your performance testing, we are now going to go on a step-by-step tutorial.

Step 1: Stakeholder Analysis

The first step in software performance testing strategy is to have a thorough stakeholder analysis. Stakeholder analysis refers to the process of attaining a green signal from your stakeholders regarding the goals, objectives, and success of a project. It comprises you conducting extensive research about the project, its requirements, and competitors to understand what exactly your role is going to be in the success of the product. There are two main factors that you need to take care of in this stage:

Gathering input from development, operations, and business teams: 

Your job as a QA tester in the project will be to gather various information about the project. To attain this you must collaborate with various teams in the organisation. Once you have received enough understanding of the progress made, you have to move on to the next step which is…

Aligning performance goals with stakeholder expectations: 

Now that you know what the project is all about, you have to set the correct metrics and goals. In other words, you have to come up with a performance-testing strategy document with an efficient plan. Then you must approach the stakeholders and see whether your goals match stakeholders’ expectations. 

Step 2: System Architecture Assessment

Once your performance testing strategies are approved, you must then move on to the System Architecture Assessment. Any software or application usually has three components to its system’s architecture. These components are the Load Generator, Application Under Test, and Monitoring and Analysis tools. So your job as a performance tester will be to set up and assess these components for their optimum performance during the test. You can do that by following the given steps:

Evaluating the architecture’s impact on performance testing: 

First thing first, you have to make sure that the load generator and the monitoring tools are performing without any errors. And then you have to test them on the software to find its impact. In this step, testers can sometimes come across certain issues and bottlenecks that need to be addressed.

Identifying potential bottlenecks in the system: 

As mentioned before, if you come across any bottlenecks or potential risk factors, you have to now identify those areas of improvement. 

Analyzing scalability and resource utilization: 

Once the bottlenecks are fixed or taken care of, you have to test the system scalability and the resource utilization of the AUT.

Step 3: Creating Test Data Strategy

To move on to the next step of a successful software testing strategy, one needs to now create a proper test data strategy. Creating a test data strategy is not a complex task. One only has to have the metrics, the objectives, and the goals clear. Also, make sure that these test cases are robust as one needs to perform the test in various ways for a longer period. 

Defining realistic and relevant test data

While building an effective test case, the tester must make sure that he has all the information he needs to make a realistic and relevant test data strategy. The key here is not to overburden the system with irrelevant data. Plus, the data put into the system must also be realistic, and driven from real-life scenarios. For a large amount of data, one must make sure that it is used in subsets to not make the tests too heavy.

Ensuring data diversity for comprehensive testing

There must be always a diverse set of data prepared with you before the whole procedure begins! One efficient way of achieving this is by creating each test responsible for its own data sets. Create that data or extract it for the testing process and then destroy it once the test is completed. The basic principle of these procedures should be to set, Execute, and tear down the data that is not required.

Addressing data privacy and security concerns

As discussed in the article so far, performance testing is a matter of handling a large amount of data systematically. But often due to poor security systems, this data can be leaked or lost. To prevent that, the tester must take preventive measures, providing robust security to ensure there is no data breach, unauthorized access, or violation of privacy regulations.

Step 4: Choosing appropriate performance testing types

 There are several types of performance testing including load testing, stress testing, endurance testing, soak testing, and more. Different types of performance testing are required to validate the different aspects of software. Depending on the requirement of your project you can choose the right performance testing types and tools. To make things easier you can even opt for different types of performance testing services which will offer qualified performance testing tools, foolproof performance testing strategy, and realistic performance testing scenarios.

Step 5: Workload Modeling

Workload modeling is an integral part of an efficient performance testing strategy. Workload modeling refers to the process of providing all the data on what type of user actions will be tested under load, what might be the business scenarios, or what the distribution of the users will be for each scenario. In short, it helps identify one or more than one workload profiles that need to be simulated against the tested application. 

Step 6: Performance Monitoring and Measurement

Performance monitoring and measurement refers to the process of continuously observing the application’s performance under a variety of load conditions. Testers can gather valuable data to diagnose issues, bottlenecks, or risk factors that can help improve the software’s performance. It can be achieved by:

Selecting relevant performance metrics

Testers must know which metric to prioritize when it comes to selecting the relevant objectives. These metrics may vary from CPU load, and disk usage, to memory used, number of errors, and more. As these metrics get monitored, they are termed counters. It is these counters that present the value to the tester which determines whether there are any bottlenecks or not.  

Implementing monitoring tools and instrumentation

At this stage of monitoring and measuring, some tools are used to observe the behavior of the system. You can use any of the tools including Dynatrance, New Relic, BlazeMeter, etc. to monitor the tests. For measuring the test results you can use Apache JMeter, Gatling, Locust, etc.   

Establishing baseline performance for comparison

Finally, it is important to create a baseline performance metric for comparison purposes. In this case, the tester needs to run a default test to see how the system performs under no set environment. Once that data is collected, the system must be run through the set test cases and environments to compare the results.

Step 7: Test Execution and Analysis

By this step, the testers must have clarity of which performance tests they have lined up one after the other. When it comes to the execution, the tester needs to run these tests like load testing, soak testing, or any other testing that is required. Once they are run, the tester needs to collect all the necessary data and document them in a proper report. This report is then going to be analyzed and presented to the developers, stakeholders, etc.

Step 8: Reporting and Communication

For the final step, all the documentation, and reports created during the test execution process, go to the respective teams for evaluation. In case there are any bottlenecks, the software is sent back to the developers to ensure that the software is free of any internal issues. In case the software is performing as per the stakeholders’ expectations, then they are sent to confirm that the software is ready to be released into the market for end-users.

Best Practices and Tips

Here are a few extra tricks and tips to ensure that your performance testing strategies are flawless:

• Performance testing is advised to be done as early as possible in the software development life cycle.
• Don’t go for performance testing for the whole unit, take individual units or modules to start the testing.
• To make sure that the tests are consistent, run several performance tests at once.
• For applications with multiple systems, test them all together and individually as well.

Conclusion

In conclusion, metrics, objectives, and business goals are vital parts of setting an effective performance-testing strategy. However, as a professional QA tester, don’t use an unnecessary number of tests and metrics to overburden the system. However, you can make use of all the performance testing strategies we have mentioned here to begin with.