Load Testing Archives | Independent Testing Company

23Jun

Unlocking the Benefits of Performance Engineering in QA: Key Practices and Techniques

Performance engineering is a cultural shift in the way organizations view their essential processes. Performance engineering embraces practices and capabilities that build quality and performance throughout an organization." - Joe Colantonio Performance Engineering is a practice that has emerged as a vital discipline within Quality Assurance (QA) to address performance-related challenges throughout the software development lifecycle. By proactively focusing on performance aspects, organizations can deliver high-performing applications that meet user expectations. Q-Pros has proven excellence in quality assurance and software testing using high-quality software and tools. This article explores the significance of performance engineering in QA and highlights its benefits and key practices. Performance engineering represents a proactive and continuous approach to application performance testing and monitoring. It fosters collaboration among various teams, tools, and processes by establishing continuous feedback loops. Unlike traditional performance testing, which solely relies on testers for quality assurance, performance engineering involves developers, performance engineers, product owners, and business analysts in ensuring the overall performance and quality of the application. It encompasses a cultural shift in organizations, emphasizing practices and capabilities that promote performance and quality throughout the development process. Benefits of Performance Engineering Performance engineering provides numerous benefits to organizations and their applications. By optimizing performance, it improves application responsiveness, enhancing the user experience and fostering customer satisfaction. It also enables scalability, allowing applications to handle increased loads and adapt to evolving business requirements. Through cost optimization, it ensures efficient resource utilization and infrastructure scaling. By proactively detecting and addressing performance issues early in the development process, it reduces future expenses and efforts. Furthermore, performance engineering enhances application stability, making them reliable under varying conditions, and facilitates data-driven decision-making through performance metrics analysis. Overall, performance engineering is vital for achieving high-performance, user-friendly, scalable, cost-effective, and stable applications. Practices and Techniques in Performance Engineering 1. Identifying tier-based engineering transactions: Dividing the application's load scripts into transactions that represent specific tiers of the deployment helps isolate and focus on the specific tier causing degradation. 2. Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs): Monitoring front-end and resource-related KPIs to understand the current capacity and workload trends. Examples of KPIs include TCP connection rate, requests per second, enqueue/dequeue count, queries per second, CPU average idle, waiting requests, free worker threads, enqueue/dequeue wait time, and free connections in the thread pool. 3. Reducing the number of transactions for analysis: Analyzing a large number of transactions can be overwhelming. Choosing a subset of transactions based on the characteristics of the application, including the landing page, log-in, business transactions with the highest and lowest response times, and engineering transactions. 4. Waiting for the test to be completed before analyzing: Avoid analyzing test results while the test is still running. Instead, let the test complete before interpreting the results and trends. 5. Ensuring reproducible results: Running each test scenario three times without making any changes to the performance test harness. This helps identify and remove any irreproducible results and ensures consistent and reliable test outcomes. 6. Ramping up the load: Starting with ghost tests to check system behavior without user activity. Then, single-user load tests to establish a baseline and identify transactions with the highest and lowest response times. Finally, concurrent user load scenarios to capture KPI metrics at different load levels. 7. Using visualization to spot anomalies: Comparing the expected behavior of a scalable application, as depicted in architectural diagrams, with the actual test results. Looking for discrepancies and anomalies to identify potential bottlenecks. 8. Looking for KPI trends and plateaus: Analyzing the trends of KPI values and focusing on the first occurring plateau in monitored hit rate KPIs. This plateau indicates a limitation in throughput and can help identify the server with the limitation. Graphing the free resources of that server to understand the root cause of the bottleneck. Performance Requirements Elicitation: Identifying clear and measurable performance requirements is crucial. Performance engineering collaborates with stakeholders to define response time, throughput, and resource utilization targets based on business needs. 9. Performance Monitoring and Alerting: Continuous performance monitoring in production environments helps identify performance degradations, abnormal behavior, and bottlenecks. Real-time monitoring tools provide insights into system health, enabling proactive measures to maintain optimal performance. Performance engineering is a vital discipline within QA that promotes a proactive and continuous focus on application performance. By involving stakeholders and implementing key practices, organizations can deliver high-performing applications that meet user expectations. Performance engineering brings collaboration, cultural shifts, and practices that enhance performance and quality. It offers benefits such as improved user experience, scalability, cost optimization, early issue detection, stability, and data-driven decision-making. Through practices like identifying transactions, monitoring KPIs, reducing analysis complexity, ensuring reproducible results, ramping up load testing, using visualization, and analyzing KPI trends, organizations can optimize performance and achieve their goals. With clear requirements and continuous monitoring, organizations can proactively address performance issues and ensure successful applications. Q-Pros is a leading test services provider, we offer software testing as one of our main services, as we understand its importance in today’s competitive market. If you would like to know more about us and our services, check out our list of offers. Find out more about us and request a testing service through our online request form....

15Nov

Load Testing vs Stress Testing: What is the Difference?

by q-pros

in QA Comparisons

Comments

In the software quality assurance field, two terms seem to stick out the most, “load testing and stress testing” - It is on any client’s top priority list to make certain that their application can handle larger levels of usage and maintain all factors of quality. Our methods at Q-Pros guarantee that software applications are set and ready for extreme scenarios for future users. In this article, we will investigate and differentiate the two tests we conduct to eliminate the possibility of such malfunctions as overloading and stress, which cause the application to either stop performing and crash, or to perform slower and force users to uninstall the application altogether. What is Load Testing? A load test will help us understand how an application behaves under expected loads. In other words, it allows us to monitor the overall performance of the application under the basic demands of real users. Load testing is not concerned with overusing the application, but it is all about measuring the performance stats under what is expected of the application. This is done via requesting several demands from the application and then investigating the speed at which it accomplishes its required responses. Load testing helps determine the bottlenecks of applications. Load testing comes in handy in certain periods of the application's usage. For example, your application might have a standard number of users most of the time, but it is not until there is an update or an offer in which will cause the number of users to spike up, take for instance a government portal in which there was a certain event that caused citizens to suddenly request an official paper, or a shopping application on black Friday. Having a good testing foundation firsthand allows you to prepare for all kinds of circumstances, and it will guarantee an increase in ROI (Return of Investment). What is Stress Testing? Stress testing allows us to identify the breaking point of the application. Breaking points are the maximum level of load an application can endure before failure. The benefit of stress testing is not only to inform companies of their application’s limitations but also to make use of such results and scale up the application based on the data gathered from stress testing. For example, knowing the breaking points allows developers to make certain changes in the application's behavior before the breaking point is reached to allow for adjustments and adaptation and avoid extreme results. This in return evaluates the robustness of the application. Stress testing is necessary for developers to know what features break first in case of extreme stress. Knowing that will help them act accordingly to make sure that no permanent crashes occur and to limit the possibility of catastrophic events. What are the differences between Load Testing and Stress Testing? Load Testing is more of an organic approach. It is not concerned with breaking the application as much as it is concerned with finding out if the application has covered its basic requirements of handling the expected levels of load. Load testing is essential for companies because it asserts confidence in the application in case of future challenges. On the other hand, Stress testing is mainly concerned with finding an application's upper limit. Stress Testing helps us determine where the application is most likely to have some sort of failure, and by doing so, it evaluates the robustness of the application. Stress testing also allows developers to enhance the application's behavior by knowing how it will react in case of failure due to maximum usage. Both load testing and stress testing are essential for companies, especially when dealing with bigger service applications that will require more usage and constant maintenance/updates. At Q-Pros, we rely on a team of testing experts using the best testing tools to achieve the best results. If you want to learn more about Load & Stress testing, request service now via our list of offers. ...