Performance Testing

For this week’s blog, I decided to research a bit on performance testing because it is listed as a topic for a class. While doing research, I found a blog called “How To Do Performance Testing: Tips And Best Practices” by Volodymyr Klymenko. In this blog, he discusses the primary purpose of this kind of software testing, types of performance testing, its role in software development, common problems revealed by performance testing, tools, steps, best practices, and common mistakes to avoid. The blog was well organized and clearly simplified each topic.

The purpose of performance testing is to find potential performance bottle necks to identify possible errors and failures. This is to ensure that the software meets the performance requirements before it is released. Some types are load testing(response under many simultaneous requests), stress testing ( response under extreme load conditions or resource constraints), spike testing (response under a significant and rapid increase in workload that exceeds normal expectations), soak testing(simulates a gradual increase in end users over time to test the system’s long-term stability), scalability testing(how the system scales when the volume of data or users increases), capacity testing (which tests the traffic load based on the number of users but differs in scope) and volume testing(which tests the response to processing a large amount of data).

The next section discusses the role of performance testing. I found some of the bullet points to be a bit obvious like “improving the system’s overall functioning”, “monitoring stability and performance”, and “assessing system scalability”. The other points mentioned were “failure recovery testing”, ”architectural impact assessment”, “resource usage assessment” and “code monitoring and profiling”.

After discussing the role of performance testing, the author discussed the common issues revealed by performance testing. The problems discussed were speed problems, poor scalability, software configuration problems, and insufficient hardware resources. This section is broken down into many bullet points to explain each issue. I found it to be very beneficial in simplifying the ideas presented.

The last three sections are the steps for performance testing, best practices, and common mistakes to avoid. The steps presented in this article for performance testing were: 1.Defining the Test Environment, 2.Determination of Performance Indicators , 3. Planning and Designing Performance Tests , 4. Setting up the Test Environment, 5. Development of Test Scenarios, 6. Conducting Performance Tests , and 7. Analyze, Report and Retest. The section after explaining the steps includes some best practices like “Early Testing And Regular Inspections “ and “Testing Of Individual Blocks Or Modules”. Some of the common mistakes to avoid that I found to be noteworthy were “Absence of Quality Control System” and “Lack of a Troubleshooting Plan”. While working on the Hack.Diversity Tech.Dive project, I had to do some performance testing and even used a tool that was mentioned in the article called Postman. In the future, I will definitely be more prepared to do performance testing now that I can reference this article.