Performance testing is a generic term that refers to testing how an application behaves under load. Performance testing should be done continuously not just on specific milestones, as this brings benefits related to:
- how the performance improves/degrades during the releases
- can be a very early indicator that something has gone wrong that might really affect the user experience even though the functional test might all still pass
- slow applications affects user experience and in the end affects monetization
Software developers try to implement applications that not only is responsive and fast with a very small number of users but also with multiple users using the application. To be able to measure this we need to rely on different types of performance testing.
Performance testing should be an integral part of the agile release manifesto.
Understanding Performance Testing Types
Load testing – type of performance testing that measures how the system responds under a given heavy load volume
Stress testing – type of performance testing that checks the upper limits and software stability by testing it under extreme workloads
Soak testing – type of performance testing that checks the software stability under normal load for a long period of time
Spike testing – type of performance testing similar to stress test but in short bursts
Scalability testing – type of performance testing that measures the stability of the system under increasing load
Volume testing – type of performance testing that measures the stability of the system during injection of large volumes of data into the application
Failover testing – type of performance testing that verifies that the redundancy and resilience work under load
Written by Chris R.
LoadFocus is a cloud testing platform, a load and stress testing tool which provides the infrastructure to run tests with thousands of concurrent users, from multiple cloud locations, in less than a few minutes, keep history of the results, compare different runs to inspect performance improvements or performance degradation. It also supports running JMeter load tests from the cloud and monitoring and audit web and mobile performance.