Load & Performance Testing Ensures Your Application’s Resilience

A strong software foundation is key to software success. Ascertaining the performance of the software’s basic functions enables management to make essential decisions based on the success, or failure, of the software’s performance. Conduct performance testing as a critical subset of your overall application testing strategy.

Each test measures a particular aspect of the performance and generates testing results for analysis. This allows you to view the vital parts of the software under normal and peak resource usage, giving you data on how the program handles scalability. The data, gauged against known, baseline standards, allows developers to make intelligent decisions about needed changes.

Software testing for load and performance often predicts behavior and can help DevOps plan for unexpected or unusual circumstances. It is important to find out early whether your organization can manage scalability. Using testing methodologies sooner rather than later helps testers maximize performance and hone capacity to manage demand.

A favorable first impression of potential customers is crucial. Research indicates almost half of all users rely on mobile and web service applications to load in two seconds or less. Your software has this tiny timeframe to make a good show to potential users before they sign off. Load time can accelerate as network capacities and connection speeds rise.

When you measure performance, it allows you to monitor how customers respond to the software. This provides an advantage because you can identify critical issues—before your customers do.

Performance testing provides a cushion for developers before they release the software. Problems often magnify after release; this testing plan irons out any issues. It’s important that teams monitor performance testing across all business divisions, so decision-makers have open channels for communicating with IT, thus making sure software performance matches business strategies.

An adequate staging environment for testing allows more time for improving technology as opposed to fighting fires in avoidable, pre-existing issues. These issues can grow rapidly and simultaneously become expensive after the software is in the customer’s hands.

These tests simulate the approximate number of users that may use the application. When reproducing representative expected load and usage conditions, centered on response times, load tests help pinpoint possible bottlenecks. The test enables developers to assess whether applications meet expectations for responsiveness and stability based on the load generated.

Also known as capacity testing. When testers use load testing, they populate large amounts of data in a database and monitor the behavior of the system overall. The purpose is to observe the performance of the software’s applications under various database volumes.

This entails testers testing the application under extreme workflows, which enables the testers to observe how the application handles large volumes of data processing or high traffic. The idea is to identify the application’s breaking point.

Also known as soak testing. Testers use this test to ensure that the software can handle the specified load over extended amounts of time. This can also check to ensure that memory leak issues don’t occur after the application runs for long periods.

Testers employing these testing measures seek to understand the implications to a system’s operations when activities on the system are above the norm. In contrast to stress tests, these tests consider the complexity of actions the system performs, and the number of users involved, which then yields an increase in the number of business processes the system generates.

Bottlenecks occur when there isn’t enough capacity to handle the workload. Testers use scalability testing processes to discover the software application’s ability to “scale up” to handle user load increases. This helps them plan for any addition in your software system’s capacity.

There are many reasons tests fail. Not every problem points to a fire. Parasoft’s load and performance testing tools test end-to-end application performance, placing performance problems in the context of the user experience. This allows you to tell when there’s an actual fire, assess its impact, and determine the best approach to extinguish it.

You don’t have to deploy a specialty tool for load and performance testing, another to test APIs, and a third for web UI testing. Parasoft test automation solutions do them all so you can deploy an integrated testing suite that works seamlessly across all interfaces.

You don’t need to create separate scenarios for functional and load and performance testing. Instead, Parasoft allows you to reuse the same API test scripts for multiple testing purposes, saving you time, effort, and money.

Parasoft’s load testing reporting dashboard allows you to study historical performance testing data easily and leverage that intelligence to develop smarter. View and analyze testing results to determine risks and next steps.

Match your user profiles to how they use your application. Apply loads that simulate such a scenario, so your load testing is personalized to your user base. This modeling also tells you how specific user experiences will be impacted under heavy loads, so that you can prepare for it and support your customers.

When running Selenium web UI tests, integrated smart analytics aggregate the test results and provide performance goals or benchmarks to generate early warnings for performance issues in your web applications.