Types Of Performance Testing
The target audiences for this article is product managers
, project managers, performance test engineers and anyone who cares about identifying performance issues in their application(s) before releasing it to market. This article helps users in identifying the correct type(s) of performance testing that needs to be conducted on their application.
Frequent releases of applications these days are not a fashion but have become a necessity for businesses to survive. Bringing quality products out in the market quickly makes software testing also challenging. In addition to performing functional testing in short span of time, organizations have to consider non functional testing also like performance, security, compatibility, localization etc. Because of the high cost involved in terms of infrastructure, skill set, duration etc. in non functional testing, outsourcing it to other organizations makes business sense most of the time, if done correctly.
Performance testing is conducted to mitigate the risk of availability, reliability, scalability, responsiveness, stability etc of the system. Like any other testing project, there are many activities involved in any performance testing project. Few of the important activities involved in any performance testing projects are identification of important business scenarios, identification of correct business scenarios mix, identification of correct workload, identification of right tools / strategy for load generation, setting up the test environment, designing the scripts for emulating business scenarios, preparing and populating the right amount of data, identification of proper performance counters / metrics to collect, designing the report template(s) for different stakeholders as per their need and execution of multiple performance runs as per the project requirement.
In performance testing there are many types of tests that can be conducted on any application / system. The type of test or run depends upon the performance requirements. In this article, I have listed down the importance of various performance test types in terms of technical and business perspective, which can be considered during multiple stages of performance testing projects. The definitions of run types might differ from other sources, but the idea is not to define but to logically divide or categorize the performance runs. Saying this, I have tried my best to adhere to the definition as close as possible from other sources. The categories are defined in terms of different performance run cycles in any performance testing project. For example in a project, load run might be performed first and Soak / Endurance testing run (with same work load) later if required.
Following is the summary of ten different performance types that can be referred to and selected for performance testing as per the business requirements. The details of these performance test types are described in their corresponding sections below.
Single User:
It is conducted for assessing performance of the application when only single user is accessing the system.
Contention:
It is conducted for validating if application works perfectly when it is accessed concurrently.
Light Load:
It is conducted for validating the performance characteristics of the system when subjected to workload / load volume much lesser than what is anticipated during the production load.
Load :
It is conducted for validating the performance characteristics of the system when subjected to workload / load volume what is anticipated during the production load.
Stress / Volume:
It is conducted to make sure that the application can sustain more load than anticipated on production
Resilience:
It is conducted to make sure that the system is capable of coming back to initial state (from stressful state to load level state) when it is stressed for short duration.
Failure:
It is conducted to find out the capability of the application in terms of load. The load (concurrent users or volume) is increased until the application crashes.
Recovery:
It is conducted to make sure that the application is able to heal itself when load is decreased from failure point to stress point and then to normal load.
Spike:
It is conducted to find out the stability of the system when it is loaded in burst of very small time and releasing the load quickly.
Soak / Endurance / Reliability / Availability / Stability:
It is conducted to find if system is capable of handling expected load without any deterioration of response time / throughput when run for a longer time.
by: Leonard Barrett
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