In 2020, on the Black Friday shopping weekend, John Lewis’ website crashed because of the surge of traffic given the sale. So was the case with Walmart and many other retail sites.
This was because the websites were not tested sufficiently for performance. As a result, when the user load went up, the app could not sustain.
Such crashes cost businesses a lot of money in fixing both the software and the brand reputation. Performance testing companies come to the rescue. Testers will perform several types of testing such as stress testing, load testing, endurance testing, spike testing, volume testing, and scalability testing to measure the performance of the software. Performance testing measures quality attributes of the system such as responsiveness, speed, scalability, and stability.
We list some Do’s and Don’ts of performance testing for performance testing companies:
Do’s:
Know clearly what you are measuring. If you know the purpose of the test clearly, you will be able to identify the best testing tool for your needs. Conduct business analysis to establish the needs of software testing. From there, you can check testing tools with features suited to meet those needs.
Figure out high load zones. Know the anticipated number of users for the software. If the software is used in multiple countries, know where users will be using the software more.
Plan out your testing scenarios carefully. Plan in advance. From knowing your prerequisites of testing as well as the entire testing procedure. Performance testing companies should be clear on the performance metrics they will be inspecting like response time, latency, throughput, errors, CPU or memory.
Carefully examine test results. This will help you understand if your testing scenarios were useful. You will know which test scenarios to run ahead.
Schedule your tests. A well-organized testing pattern will save time for performance testing companies. Good logging will also make it easy to view which tests have been conducted.
Don’ts:
Do not use price as a measure to evaluate your testing tool’s effectiveness. Check out the features of the tool and determine if it is fit to use for your testing needs. Taking the budget approach may appear to lower costs, but is likely to incur bigger costs later, resulting from inadequate testing.
Do not drive out developers, network engineers, and business owners from being involved in the testing process. While testers do the testing job primarily, keeping all team players posted fosters collaboration. A developer may give the tester a different angle of measuring the performance of the application.
Do not add too much load all at once. Increase the load one step at a time. For example, run a test with 5 users per second, then bump it to 10, 50 and so on. Adding load in increments makes it easy to understand and analyze test results.
Do not forget to rerun tests when conditions are changed. For example, when code is changed on release of new build, rerun the test. Similarly, any change in hardware or database would require a rerunning of tests.
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