Post application development process, an important factor that draws our attention is its performance. Performance Testing plays a very crucial role in the success of a software application among its users. Now performance is measured in terms of the load conditions given to the system. That is, a replica of the application under test is constructed to ascertain that it performs exactly as in a real environment. Ideally an application must perform effortlessly and offer optimised performance within least time.
Performance Testing Checklist thus helps to validate performance characteristics of an application by passing the application under test through various load conditions to verify that the system is capable of handling multi user load request, at any given point of time.
Performance Testing Checklist:
Track response time of an application with respect to the amount of tasks an application needs to handle at a given point of time, the time taken by the application or may be a web browser to give back the results.
Identify the pattern of workload given to the system. For instance, verify at what rate or how often the amount of load increases or decreases.
In case of a web based performance testing, provide proper credentials like URI's to the application under test.
Analyse the size of database to be used during performance testing, as the results of this testing varies in great degree in accordance with the size of the database used.
One important dimension to this is the number of layers or tiers an actual application is comprised of. To achieve the ultimate target of performance testing, one should test the application with the exact number of tiers it is composed of as it would be in the production environment.
Testing performance of an application also demands accurate and complete knowledge of the application under test. Every detail regarding the application under test must be documented to avoid any confusion during the process of testing.
Test engineers must plan the test environment in advance so as it reflects the same architecture of the system as in the production environment. The test and production environment should be equivalent in nature.
Hardware configurations form an important aspect of performance testing process. Performance test engineers must be well versed with the type of server machine niceties like CPU speed, RAM, disk, network bandwidth etc.
Reading from, writing to and updating in the database are a crucial part of performance testing process. Such activities can have great impact on the performance of a software application, because with an increase in the number of records in the application, the time required to fetch results from the database may vary.
Load injector requirements are important in order to produce the required load on the machine. Every virtual user can generate a certain amount of load though load injector tools. This aspect should also be planned well in advance by the test engineers.
Conclusion:
Performance testing checklist is a great way to enlist the various steps it must pass through. Preparing a checklist always helps to enlighten in advance the key aspects to be taken into consideration for an efficient testing process.
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