Performance Testing Life Cycle : All You Need To Know About Testing Phases

The modern era of IT has seen an overwhelming evolution of the Software Testing industry giving way to greener pastures. Thus it becomes very important to ensure the effective performance of the software application. This “Performance Testing Life Cycle” article will provide in-depth knowledge about the process of testing in the following sequence:

What is Performance Testing?

Performance Testing is a type of software testing which ensures that the application is performing well under the workload. The goal of performance testing is not to find bugs but to eliminate performance bottlenecks. It measures the quality attributes of the system. 

The attributes of Performance Testing include:

• Speed  – It determines whether the application responds quickly.
• Scalability  – It determines maximum user load the software application can handle.
• Stability  – It determines if the application is stable under varying loads.

Now let’s move ahead with our Performance Testing Life Cycle article and have a look at the advantages of Performance Testing.

Advantages of Performance Testing

1. Validate Features - Performance testing validates the fundamental features of the software. Measuring the performance of basic software functions allows business leaders to make key decisions about the setup of the software.
2. Measure the speed, accuracy, and stability – It helps you in monitoring the crucial components of your software under duress. This gives you vital information on how the software will be able to handle scalability.
3. Keep your users happy –  Measuring application performance allows you to observe how your customers respond to your software. The advantage is that you can pinpoint critical issues before your customers.
4. Identify discrepancies –  Measuring performance provides a buffer for developers before release. Any issues are likely to be magnified once they are released.
5. Improve optimization and load capability – Measuring performance can help your organization deal with volume so your software can cope when you hit high levels of users.

Now that you know the advantages of Performance Testing, let’s have a look at the different steps involved in the Performance Testing Life Cycle.

Performance Testing Life Cycle

Performance Testing starts parallel with Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The different phases of Performance Testing Life Cycle (PTLC) are:

Non-Functional Requirements Elicitation and Analysis

It is one of the most important and critical steps to understand the non-functional requirements in PTLC. It helps to evaluate the degree of compliance with non-functional needs.

Performance Test Strategy

The second defines how to approach Performance Testing for the identified critical scenarios. You need to address the kind of performance testing and the tools required.

Performance Test Design

This phase involves the script generation using the identified testing tool in a dedicated environment. The script enhancements are needed to be done and unit tested.

Performance Test Execution

The next phase is dedicated to the test engineers who design scenarios based on identified workload and load the system with concurrent virtual users.

Performance Test Result Analysis

In this phase, the collected log files are analyzed and reviewed by the experienced test engineers. Tuning recommendation will be given if any conflicts are identified.

Benchmark & Recommendations

This is the last phase in PTLC which involves benchmarking and providing a recommendation to the client.

These were the different phases involved in the performance testing life cycle. Now let’s have a look at the different types of performance testing.

Types of Performance Testing

The different types of performance testing are:

• Load testing –  It checks the application’s ability to perform under anticipated user loads. The objective is to identify performance bottlenecks before the software application goes live.
• Stress testing –  This involves testing an application under extreme workloads to see how it handles high traffic or data processing. The objective is to identify the breaking point of an application.
• Endurance testing –  It is done to make sure the software can handle the expected load over a long period of time.

• Spike testing –  This tests the software’s reaction to sudden large spikes in the load generated by users.
• Volume testing  – Under Volume Testing large no. of. Data is populated in a database and the overall software system’s behavior is monitored. The objective is to check the software application’s performance under varying database volumes.
• Scalability testing  – The objective of scalability testing is to determine the software application’s effectiveness in scaling up to support an increase in user load. It helps plan capacity addition to your software system.

Now, if you want to perform any of these testings on your server, you would need different types of tools that are compatible with your test plan. Let’s have a look at some of the important performance testing tools.

Tools for Performance Testing

The market is full of a number of tools for test management, performance testing, GUI testing, functional testing, etc. I would suggest you opt for a tool which is on-demand, easy to learn as per your skills, generic and effective for the required type of testing. Let’s have a look at the top 10 Performance Testing Tools:

• LoadNinja
• Apache JMeter
• WebLOAD
• LoadUI Pro
• LoadView
• NeoLoad
• LoadRunner
• Silk Performer
• AppLoader
• SmartMeter.io

With this, we have come to the end of the Performance Testing Life Cycle article. I hope you guys enjoyed this article and got an idea about the different phases involved in performance testing. And if you found this article informative, you can go ahead and read similar blogs here.

Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section of “Performance Testing Life Cycle” and we will get back to you.