Gallop Performance Testing

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Cloud Based Performance Testing

In simple words, Internet-based-computing can be referred to as Cloud computing. Here, shared hardware and software resources are available for use as per demand. This concept is also based on optimum utilization of the increasing power of servers and virtualization technologies. It is the convergence of computing, networking and storage which create a dynamic infrastructure which makes these functions highly dependant on each other. This forces a change in management strategy.

Performance generally refers to the statistics regarding response time, throughput and resource utilization of an application. It is not difficult to assess that a performance problems impact customer experience, revenues,  brand perception and overall user satisfaction.

Let us review the tools for performance testing in the cloud.

- Load Storm: This allows developers to evaluate how an application will respond under heavy volumes of HTTP traffic. It gives massive cloud resources in the hands of web developers which enables them to improve the performance of their application.

- SOASTA – CloudTest: It provides performance, functional, Web User Interface and AJAX testing as an on-demand service.

- VMLogic : And Skytap offer scalable test labs along with management software in the cloud. On an average these can cost several thousand  dollars per month.

- TechOut: This tool helps to measure and optimize the speed and availability of  critical online applications. It also provides Website Monitoring, REST/SOAP Web Services Monitoring, Business Transactions Monitoring, Cloud Monitoring, etc.

- IntroSpectrum: It is a hosted performance monitoring system that makes use of real browsers to provide the most accurate view of website performance. It is hosted in the cloud and hence it is platform/OS agnostic. It works with any public website or any web application.

- LoadIntelligence: It can use JMeter in the cloud. It is an affordable Software as  a Service from Cloud Intelligence. It includes access to software and unlimited hardware resources. Users of JMeter can execute their test scripts in an unlimited, pre-configured distributed environment. It neither requires setup nor installations. Also, it provides immediate access to JMeter logs, reports, test scripts, CSV files and more.

- Xceptance LoadTest: It is a load testing and regression tool for  Web apps and Java apps load testing. For web-based tests it can emulate Internet Explorer or Firefox behavior.

- Grinder in the Cloud: It is a cloud based, open source load testing tool which uses resources offered by Amazon Web Services. It leverages Grinder Load Test Framework by putting it in the cloud.

-  Pylot: It is a Web Testing tool from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2). It generates concurrent load (HTTP Requests), verifies server responses and produces reports with metrics. Test suites, which are executed are monitored from a GUI or shell/console.

-  HPLoadRunner, Keynote and BrowserMob are some additional cloud based performance testing tools.

Conclusion

Performance is critical to revenue and an efficient performance tuning of an application can increase revenue by 10%. Cloud performance, which is measured at the point of application use is the sum of application performance, network performance and cloud infrastructure performance. Cloud based performance testing tools offer a way to test across platforms and ensures capacity even in the most extreme scenarios.

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Performances Testing vs Performance Engineering: The Real Difference

Performance of the software or the finished output is a universal quality which is often affected by each aspect of its code, means for execution as well as its design. It has been found out that half of the executives in majority of the IT concerns face performance issues with respect to 20 % of the projects that they are handling. Ensuring sound performance of the software applications is crucial for the growth of the IT firms and more so in the mobile devices. The success also depends on the user experience to a considerable extent as many times poor performance leads to frustration and dissatisfaction amongst the clients.

Adoption of mobile technology is the latest as well as the phenomenon in the history that demonstrates the fastest technology adoption curve. The mobile application market is expected to experience a tremendous growth within the next few years. Sound performance of the application that are deployed to the mobile devices becomes highly significant as poor performance  often hampers the revenue levels, brand image and lead to decline in customer loyalty.

To achieve sound performance standards with respect to the software applications, performance engineering and performance testing both are crucial and needs to be undertaken. Both of these need to be optimized and used appropriately to drive great performance standards.

Performance Engineering

Performance engineering in case of Software Development with respect to mobile platforms has been observed to be one of the fastest growing areas in Software Engineering. Through performance engineering, the connection between recognition of a business and success of the application when the same is applied to mobile based software is now largely becoming apparent.

Performance engineering encompass a set of roles, activities, skills, tools, practices and deliverables that are applied at each and every phase of the SDLC that leads to ensuring that a solution is going to be designed, implemented, and finally operationally supported for meeting the non-functional requirements in case of performance like latency, throughput or even memory usage.

With the connection between the success of the application and that of the business gradually gaining recognition especially in terms of the mobile devices, performance engineering has adopted a perfective and preventive role within the SDLC.

- It is invasive and involves people from different units of an organization but chiefly within the IT company.

- It helps in increasing the business revenue by means of ensuring that the system is able to process transactions in the required timeframe.

- It helps in eliminating late deployment of the system and system rework owing to issues related to performance

- It also helps in elimination of avoidable efforts with respect to system tuning. - Performance Engineering helps in avoiding unnecessary as well as additional acquisition costs of hardware.

- Helps in the reduction of increased costs with respect to software maintenance owing to performance related problems in case of production.

Performance Testing 

In case of software engineering, performance testing is an in general and non functional testing that is carried out in order to determine the performance of a system with respect to stability and responsiveness in face of a specified workload. Often this type of testing helps in the investigation of measure, validation or verification of other attributes of a system that establishes the quality of the same like reliability, scalability and usage of resources.

- It serves a number of purposes like demonstrating of the system that fulfils performance criteria.

- It can also be employed for comparing the performance of two systems for finding out the one that performs better. It can also measure the part of a system or the specific workload that are the basic causes accounting for bad or poor performance of a system.

Performance Testing consists of a number of testing like Stress testing, Load Testing , Spike Testing, Soak Testing, Isolation testing and Configuration testing.

Performance engineering does not merely encompass the supporting infrastructure and the software itself but more than that. Due to its macro approach, it has evolved into an altogether separate discipline in case of a number of the organizations. Its adherence to the non functional requirements also gets validated post the deployment of the same through monitoring of the production systems. On the other hand, being a subset of Performance Engineering, Performance Testing is a practice that strives for establishing sound performance into the design, implementation and architecture of the system.

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Does your application crumble under load?

  Performance testing is an intrinsic part of the whole testing process which involves testing the applications with varied amount of load, stress and strategic performance related parameters. In addition to the current expected load, applications also need to be future proof to handle organic load scalability driven by greater product adoption.

An application crash not only causes significant revenue loss but also increases the chances of loss of credibility and trust. This it becomes imperative for all software applications to be tested for scalability and increased resource usage in the future. Let us take a look at performance testing process which ensures your application runs seamlessly at varied loads and even stays afloat in case of sudden traffic spikes.

There are news items every holiday & festive season that e-commerce sites have crashed when more than expected number of visitors turn up to the portal. The most common response is site loads forever. Performance testing helps predict and prevent bottlenecks to ensure applications run as expected under load. For online applications it becomes even more important as it affects the search engine rankings as well as while the users abandon the site due to late responses.

 Performance testing comprises of various subsets like Stress testing, Load testing, Volume testing, Spike Testing and Scalability testing. The motive of all these testing practices is to make sure that your system performs as per the user expectations and gives him an experience which is trouble free. Validation of the software’s performance under varied load conditions and putting it artificially under pressure gives the developers many loop holes on which they can work and improve the performance. Memory leakage is one of the common performance related issues which gets detected in performance testing. Scalability of system is also very important along with speed as it judges the performance of the system for future test cases and for some spike situations when the traffic might rise suddenly.

A Performance testing process comprises of designing and configuring the test cases in such a way that they try to subject the system by varying various load parameters. All this is accomplished using Performance testing automation tools. Most common performance related issues are related to Response time, Load time, Hardware utilisation of HDD & CPU, Network delay and Software configurations. Such issues are commonly identified by the software testers and reported.

Various automated performance testing tools are used to ease the task of testers who need to create the virtual environment to execute test cases to test the system. These testing tools put the software application under continuous and random stress, load to bring the best out of it and measure the response time and overall performance of the system. A test plan including the performance test process is a must and should comprise of the choice of right test tool to execute variety of test cases. Analysing the test results, fine tuning the application and then retesting the application removes the performance bottlenecks and makes it a user friendly application.

Performance testing is a major part of UI experience and should not be ignored as it can have wide ranging impact on the business operations and sales. It should be a major part of any software development process as it is directly related to the end user experience and a failed application can impact the customer’s perception of the brand.