Performance Testing: Different Types

Performance testing in the context of software quality assurance is the process of gauging a given software’s capabilities and quality. It is critical because it offers valuable information on the scalability, stability & reliability of the application.

The concept of performance testing is, of course, crucial to the development process: after all, it helps companies optimize their app’s performance by providing critically important information and analysis of the app’s scalability, stability, reliability, and other such factors. While the planning of an effective performance test strategy is complex performance testing covers a wide variety of specialized test types that require a specific application.

Well, now that you are familiar with the concept and the purpose it serves, it is time to take a closer look at the different types of performance testing:

Scalability Testing

With scalability testing, the company endeavors to understand the software’s ability to deal with growing amounts of load and processing requirements. Under the purview of this form of testing, the team measures factors such as the app’s CPU usage, response time, throughput, transaction processing speed, hits and requests per second, etc. It must be noted that the results thus achieved from such testing are often used during the planning and design stages of app development to help cut down costs while also addressing potential performance-related issues.

Load Testing

The key goal of load testing is to gauge the software’s performance when it is faced with a growing number of users. Of course, as part of this test, the app is subjected to a growing number of users and the performance results are then evaluated to see if the app is indeed able to meet the company’s requisites and expectations. This test is what companies use to analyze the app’s performance and response time for all business-critical actions and transactions.

Stress Testing

Stress testing involves subjecting the app to load conditions that would qualify as being the standard or expected load conditions. Now, one may be inclined to believe that stress testing and load testing are essentially the same but the truth is that the goal of the former types of testing is to find the app’s breaking point. No, really; finding the app’s breaking point helps companies analyze how the app responds to high traffic volumes and how strong its data processing capabilities are.

Volume Testing

This type of testing helps companies analyze if the application can seamlessly deal with extensive volumes of data. Under the purview of this type of testing, the team analyzes how the app’s response time and the behavior are affected in the face of an increased load to determine impediments to the app’s performance. This test also helps companies get a better idea of the system’s capacity. Hence, this particular type of performance testing, alternatively known as flood testing, is crucial for apps that involve big data.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen, some of the top different forms of performance testing. Of course, each one of the different types of performance testing serves a distinctive purpose; thus, you should pick tests from among the various software performance testing types based on the business’ expectations and requirements as well as those of the software in question, of course. It must also be noted that while performance testing is decidedly beneficial, the ability to tap its full potential is highly dependent on the test strategy the company uses. It would be a good idea to not take a one-size-fits-all approach; instead, build a performance test strategy based on the business’s requirements and other relevant factors.