What is performance testing?
Performance testing is done to ensure that the app will work smoothly under the expected workload. The goal is to find the performance issues like reliability, resource usage, etc and not to find bugs. Three main things that we should keep in mind while doing performance testing are quick response, maximum user load, and stability in a varied environment. Even if you are focusing on mobile testing and using online Android emulators, performance testing cannot be avoided.
Performance Testing Process
The approach to initiate performance testing can vary according to the application and requirements. The objective is the same to check if the app meets the expected performance criteria. And there are several automated process tools like Testrigor software testing tool that makes it much better and more streamlined. So let’s have a look at the process of performance testing.
Acceptance Criteria: The first thing to be done is to set success criteria and constraints for resource allocation, throughput and response time. The best way to do is to find a similar app and compare to set the performance goals.
Planning and Test Environment: Simulate a variety of end users and outline what
matrix is to be gathered. Also, there is a need to prepare the test environment before the execution and arrange the resources.
Design Implementation and Test Execution: Create test scripts according to your test design, then execute and monitor the test.
Analysis: Collect the test reports, analyze and share it with the team. Then the tests can be fine-tuned depending on the performance status of the app.
Types of Performance testing
Endurance Testing: This done to check if the app can withstand the load that it is expected to have to endure for a long period of time.
Scalability Testing: It is done to check the performance of an app in maximum load and minimum load at software, hardware, and database level.
Load Testing: In this, the system simulates actual user load on any app to check the threshold for the max load the app can bear.
Stress Testing: This is done to check the reliability, stability and error handling of an app under extreme load conditions.
Spike Testing: In this, an app is tested with sudden increment and decrement in the user load. By performing spike testing, we also get to know the recovery time for the app to stabilize.
Volume Testing: This done to analyze the apps behavior and response time when flooded with a large amount of data.
Performance Problems
Here is a list of some commonly faced issues related to the performance of the application.
Bottleneck issues: Some times there can be an error in the coding or any hardware issue which causes a decrease in the output under the expected load. The testers need to find the piece of code which is causing the slowdown and fix it. The most common performance bottlenecks are CPU utilization, Network Utilization, Memory utilization, Operating system limitations, and memory usage.
Scalability: If the number of users crosses the expected limit then the app might face some issues and load testing can be performed to ascertain the number of users.
Load Time: Due to external reasons the app might take more time to load in the starting. Although it is preferred that the load time to be kept to a minimum.
Response Time: The response time of the application should be quick or else the user will lose interest. As soon as the user inputs the data he/she should be able to see the output quickly.
Conclusion
Before marketing the product it is required to test the performance in a different environment. Customer satisfaction and retention is a top priority and to achieve that the performance of the app should be consistent. If the app crashes or any one of the features of the app doesn’t work in a situation then the app will get bad reviews and the download will decrease too. This can be avoided by doing performance testing.
