What Are The Objectives Of A Performance Testing Company?

Creating an application, cleaning it from errors, and making it a successful product could be considered the key objectives of an IT firm, however, a Performance Testing Company has some distinguished goals in the testing framework.

In performance testing, achieving success and getting satisfying feedback from the end users/ prospect buyers is not the end of the story and the only target.

Let’s say, your app becomes a huge success in no time. Definitely, it would have gained the popularity with a huge number of users. But unfortunately, the app didn’t have enough capacity to handle a cluster of consumers, it surrenders to the uncontrollable load and crashes at the end. Sounds Quite Frightening?!

Subsequently, developing and launching are the utmost phases of any product, and this is where most of the performance testing takes place. A Performance Tester crosschecks the app’s critical speed as well as its content delivery. Significantly, it validates how good an app can perform in a condition where it gets piled with hundreds of thousands of users in the future?

Need to Outline the Objectives

Before beginning the process of performance testing, a tester should crucially pre-define some goals in order to achieve desired results. Because if your team has to add up anything in between the process, so it will definitely shatter the scrum workflow. No team member would ever like to redo any test case since it would be frustrating and time taking as well.

Deliberately determined goals could prove to be the best policy of any Performance Testing Company.

Onward, before beginning the performance testing, make an outline, define some well-devised objectives and goals for the smooth workflow throughout.

Following are some substantial objectives, commonly set by renowned performance testing firms:

Predefining Metrics for AUT

Everything pre-planned is the best plan. So, in case of Application Under Testing (AUT), a tester should pre-script metrics and measurements of a specific test case. Well-organized metrics can indicate how an app will perform in the future.

Generally, in performance testing following are the most chosen metrics: 

• Responsiveness of Application: It’s about how fast an app reacts to the user’s request. It keeps particular importance at the ends of both server and client.
• Measurement of Resource Utilization: It helps in defining parameters. Moreover, it gives an idea about the frequency of each system’s resource used in the testing process per transaction or per operation. These system resources, can be databases, CPU, Disk I/O, Memory, Network I/O etc.
• Application Throughput: It is the important quantitative measurement of requests or responses at a given time. TPS (Transaction per second) is the most common technique used for this purpose. The transactions include credit card transactions, number of concurrent users, and so on.
• Workload: It is the tendency of an app to handle a flood of end users at a specific time. When load testing an app, a tester can simulate the concurrent users to calculate the workload more aptly by adding a random think time. It helps in getting the idea of real-world situations accordingly.

Creating Applicable Test Cases

After defining some specific test metrics, it’s time a performance tester designs quite applicable test cases. In order to achieve the anticipated objectives, every metric should be tested on various formats and simulated environments. Thus, the obtained measurements indicate the capabilities/tendencies of these metrics in the future.

A performance tester is liable to assure that every considered variable/parameter is helpful enough to determine the performance level of an application.

After all the initial preparations, a tester carefully discusses the parameters with the system resource professionals, while the application designer also takes part in the thoughtful discussion. This is how a tester understands the demands of the application, clients, servers, and ultimately defines its testing goals.

 Thus, a thoughtfully planned test suite is established which monitors the following aspects of a product:

• Consistency
• Scalability and Stability under the flood of concurrent users
• How much degradation can the app withstand?
• Regression testing; examines if the app performs the same way like before after being altered or combined with new changes or different interface. For example, the changes could be the updates, patches, configuration, etc.
• Last but not the least, does the app have the capacity to withstand varying user loads?

Logical Analysis of End-Results

After carefully testing all the defined elements, logical and flexible analysis of the end-results are extracted out of the whole process.

The test cases are then passed as per the already fixed criteria. The analysts assess the aftermaths carefully.

The end-results if wisely extracted can be very helpful in outlining the further goals of performance testing. For example, there can be more room for improvement in the product’s speed and sustainability in the future.

Ultimately, it guides you if the application is ready enough to be delivered to its owner or the clients.

Consequently, it is vital that every performance testing company defines and pre-determines their objectives to justify the requisites of an app as well as the client. Because detecting errors is important, but identifying the weaknesses and delays in an application is another vigorous role of testing which is often overlooked by most IT companies.

However, Kualitaem is a good example that sets objectives, defines their test cases and achieves their goals with the mindful arrangement of performance monitoring plans. 

Happy Performance Testing!

Author Bio

Ray Parker is an entrepreneur and internet marketer with over 9 years of experience in Search Engine Optimization, Creative Writer and Digital Marketing.