6 Ways to Plan Application Performance Testing

Featured article by Stella Murugesan, Independent Technology Author

Today business organizations think that providing customers with a complete digital experience is more important than page speed and load times. This is the reason why application performance testing is becoming a responsibility for the testers and they are pushed by the developers to adapt multi-layered testing methods. But without a plan or strategy, no process can take place. If you don’t know how to manage things then you will definitely puzzle in achieving the best results.

Making a plan for the implementation of performance testing is not easy to process. It requires a detailed plan-of-action to avoid hustles. A performance test should be capable to test the website in different types of conditions which may include public-facing experiences and high-traffic. And to plan a performance test there are so many things which a developer has to keep in mind. Let’s figure out a few ways which can help you while planning for performance testing.

1. Business Goal

It is very important to understand the requirements of the clients. All clients have some expectations from the applications and the performance of the application. Put your efforts in the performance testing to reach the client’s goals. Once the goal is clear in your mind, focus on the specific area, instead of creating exhaustive testing packages for the different sections of the application. Plan the test cases according to the different modules and expectations of the customers and clients from the application. The testing plan should always reflect the mirror like environment.

2. Include Think time in testing

Think time can be defined as the time intervals taken by the user while working on your application. Usually, the users take these breaks to go through the information appearing on the screen while switching from one section to another or applying their intelligence to work according to their plans. Most of the time breaks occur while confirming address and bank details filled by the user. While designing the test scripts, you can fix a certain amount of time as the fixed time between two consecutive requests with minimum and maximum time values. This is important because all customers spend their time to grab the information so that they can clarify the purpose and the proper functionality of the website.

3. Learn from previous experiences

Performance issues take some time to crop up and figure out the issues. It is always advisable to conduct tests under previous conditions multiple times and see which issues occur continuously. This continuous observation will help you to create your own system with filters to identify performance issues. The best quality of the tester and observer is that he should try to analyze testing results with his own testing decisions. He should take time and use his experience to understand the roots of the problem. If you will learn from your previous mistakes only then you and your application will grow more.

4. Identify the performance Bottlenecks

You can never guess and imagine when the next performance issue in the application will arrive, no matter how experienced you are. It is very important to initially start with individual modules instead of focusing on the full module, at the time of issue occurs. The process is a bit time consuming but it is cost effective and needs fewer efforts. Diagnose the web application carefully to figure out various issues like functionality, usability, security, browser compatibility, and performance. There is a long list of web application performance bottlenecks, and few of them are stated below:-

•   User’s extended response time

•   Server’s extended response time

•   CPU usage

•   Invalid data return

•   HTTP errors

•   Open connections

•   Queues of requests

•   Database deadlocks

•   Page unavailability

5. Focus on Baseline Tests

When you are working on some project with a deadline then time management is a very important aspect. A developer or a tester must take baseline tests very seriously because most of the errors are regulated at the times of baseline tests. Baseline test helps the developer or tester to save time during load tests. After the baseline test, you will get a report which may include an introduction section, a graph representation, and a personalized interpretation. It is easy for the developers to identify the baseline problems as well as to correct the baseline problems. So, please pay full attention to baseline testing and consider it as important as other testing methods in your testing plan.

6. Scripts should be at right places

It is very important for an organization to plan a performance test to keep the business goal in mind. Because if there is a business goal then inventory targets and conversion targets, everything should be in the forms of scripts. You should plan the storyboard of your tests so that you can mention them back whenever it’s necessary. Development cycles keep the functionality of the website unstable and test should be done at some stable point of the application. A storyline helps in planning the occurrence of different tests as per the requirement. And to place, these scripts at right positions are also very important. A developer has to understand the importance of these coded scripts while performing automation testing.

Conclusion

There are some factors that you should keep in mind before creating a performance testing plan. Remember the automation strategy plan should always be different from regular testing aspects which you already know. You need to get your basics right, before moving on the actual plan creation process for performance testing. You must know which tools are beneficial for your website testing with your experience. If you don’t know the basics then the tools may prove to be useless. Experience in a particular field will also help you to make a perfect testing plan for your web application.

It needs to mention here that the above-stated points are also important as the engineering principles are for an application. Technical issues will appear for sure, but if you are ready with your tools then you will tackle them easily and save the day.

About the Author

Stella is a Content Writer and Digital Marketing Analyst with a demonstrated history of working in the Tech industry. She has written articles on testing, big data,  analytics and latest trends in the tech world. She likes to try different cuisines and travelling to new places.