A Quick Overview
In today’s cut-throat competitive times, the significance of continuous performance testing shouldn’t be ignored at any rate. Let’s say you have opened your favourite app, thinking that it will work flawlessly. Now, what if things turn out to be completely different, every click responds with a delay and navigation isn’t easy, and the experience doesn’t remain smooth, especially when the number of users is increasing.
Getting the best of all the worlds, which means no delayed responses, features flowing in a natural manner, experience remains smooth even if countless users are added, and so more. Earlier, this used to be considered as a pure matter of luck. However, this is no longer the case; it happens due to conducting continuous performance testing, which is also known as CPT.
If you ask me to define continuous performance testing in one line, I would say it is a relentless procedure which allows digital platforms to stay fast and highly reliable. We are living in a world where expectations grow every now and then. And CPT is the only thing which makes things run in a seamless, smooth and clockwork direction.
So what exactly does continuous automated performance testing offer:
- Achieve optimal availability
- Easy response times
- Amazing user satisfaction
- Spotting potential slowdowns
By doing all this can certainly result in making better, well-informed decisions and maintaining high levels of user satisfaction via the entire development process.
What is Continuous Performance Testing?
Continuous performance testing, or continuous performance test, is all about successfully monitoring the overall performance of the developed app even under increased and decreased load.
The performance testing is usually conducted on every code commit; this is done to successfully eliminate the need for manual performance tests, which are pretty time-consuming and expensive.
The ultimate objective is to perform tests continuously. So even if you have to keep on adding new test cases or updating the old ones, with the ever-evolving changes within the application, the performance testing scenario will make things work.
Who needs to conduct performance testing?
- Companies with a large user base
- High volumes of regular interaction as well as seasonal spikes in traffic
- Invested lots of time or money in a project, especially one with a longer lifespan
- Having a large number of staff available
Of course, there is no denying the fact that not every company has the same development as well as testing needs, but this doesn’t mean there is no need to conduct continuous performance testing. For example, let’s say the app developed is based on a browser game, which means it is pretty feasible to predict user actions, and the external inputs are pretty moderate as well. You no longer need to conduct performance testing. On the contrary, continuous performance testing must be conducted when you are willing to reduce overall productivity in comparison to improving anything. More importantly, here teams can highly focus on periodic end-to-end tests so that you are able to make several meaningful decisions regarding the architecture and trade-offs among the size of the app as well as heavy workloads.
On and all, integrating continuous performance testing is extremely important since here you are bound to receive a full-fledged structural approach, especially in regard to software development and CI/CD pipelines.
Benefits of continuous performance testing
Fortunately, continuous performance testing offers a wide range of assistance and advantages, some of which are mentioned below, such as:
Risk-based feedback - By conducting continuous testing, you are bound to come up with software incorporating features that are ready to use even before the software is released. Due to tangible feedback, it is possible for managers as well as developers to find and fix notable flaws. Also, it is possible for developers to create better designs with the help of immediate feedback, providing managers with tons of information which can be evaluated, and the software can be released in no time.
More efficient testing - The next benefit gained from continuous performance testing is, both managers as well as developers can get the tests done at the right times in the right manner. Also, they can make decisions on whether the delivery pipeline needs to move left or right. In addition, here redundancy is thoroughly eliminated, which leads to saving a significant amount of time. When you conduct continuous testing, you are bound to have the optimal architecture for future expansion of their different products, especially when users are willing to add more and more features.
Stable user experience - Also, when you happen to conduct continuous testing, it is possible to prevent software bugs from reaching the end users and even many times disrupting the experience. It is very crucial for developers to balance offering end users the additional features they want as well as maintaining an absolutely smooth user experience.
After all, you don’t want your software leading to a bad user experience, ultimately creating a financial disaster.
Automate Performance Testing - Conducting some basic performance tests means you need to make keep them running; as a result, comprehensive performance tests are successfully scheduled at regular intervals, especially due to extreme complexity and resource demands.
Analyse and Report Results Automatically - Now it's time to successfully integrate different reporting tools where it is possible to analyse results of performance tests and generate reports in an accurate manner. The only concern is that these reports need to be accessible to the entire team and feature relevant comparisons with previous tests to identify trends. Interpreting performance tests means you need to analyse different graphs and response times as well as compare them in regard to baselines or SLAs.
So basically, when you conduct continuous performance testing, it is possible to:
- Prevent major outages
- Enhance customer experience
- Ensure that performance service-level agreements are met successfully
- Ensure that performance doesn’t slip over time
- Successfully find and resolve application performance problems faster
Challenges of Performance Testing Tool
Teams are shifting left, moving at a fanatic pace as well as integrating feedback loops, which often turn out to be a bottleneck. At times performance testing does hinge on last-mile validations or project-based assessments, fret not this is extremely common and happens all the time. So here down below I would like to mention some common challenges to consider while conducting performance testing.
Performance testing happens too late
Performance validation mainly comes at the end of the cycle. In simple terms, testers often discover performance regressions at the eleventh hour leading to costly rework, late-stage rework, and missed release deadlines.
This usually happens because performance testing is a specialized function featuring dedicated teams who are all set to use heavyweight tools that are unable to integrate seamlessly with Agile and devOps.
As a solution - You need to begin embedding performance testing at a pretty early stage with different APIs. Since they are easier to test, represent the ultimate backbone of some of the most modern apps and are successfully defined in different specs.
Manual test maintenance slows everything down
With every single change, performance scripts tend to break with every single change. Some of the legacy tools demand heavy lifting since they want to keep up with evolving application logic, environments as well as different business procedures.
Why this happens, well traditional performance heavily rely on brittle scripting models as well as static infrastructure which doesn’t reflect on the dynamism of modern software delivery.
So what you can do is to overcome such a challenge, simply switch to tools which support automated script maintenance. You can think of using dynamic updates and codeless test design, reducing script maintenance to a significant level. This mainly speeds up delivery and even frees up performance engineers so that they can focus on ultimate strategy.
Lack of collaboration
Performance testing is mainly isolated especially from functional testing and development, this makes it extremely harder to share results, align on goals as well as act on performance insights.
Since here engineers have resided among centers of excellence whereas product teams work in decentralized DevOps pods. In addition, other aspects which widen the gap include use of different tools, languages, and KPIs
As a solution, you need to consider shared responsibility. You can make use of both experts and non-experts to successfully contribute, integrating seamlessly with CI/CD. Here you are bound to receive a thoroughly unified, cross-team quality with quick performance and functional insights all in one place.
Best Practices with Continuous Performance Testing
Focus on SLAs
First and foremost, you need to successfully set a foundation of different expectations, depending on performance service level agreements. This is often known as the North star.
The app’s SLAs must be able to determine the exact level of performance that qualifies as a successful test result. The SLA will require apps to meet as well as exceed a certain level of throughput and this happens at any given point, at least here a baseline needs to be set or you should be able to define what means or what are the merits for conducting a successful test.
Here you can seek assistance from Blazermeter and it would be great if you can use it at a pretty early stage. As soon as you are well-versed with SLAs, time to make the most of BlazerMeter’s performance testing UI where you can successfully customize regarding how much load of the developed app will be under while performing the tests. Also, it is possible to figure out how many virtual users will hit the app over a specific duration and then alter.
It is possible to test even at a minimum required load, higher loads are used for different situations and even extreme loads so that you get a better perspective regarding how it will hold up while a high spike in user activity.
Once these tests are executed again and again, the outcome is absolutely positive.
Be Test-Driven
The next best practice to consider is the continuous performance testing approach. This is supposed to be test-driven to be successfully agile. Here using older models such as waterfall definitely saves most of the work of the testers for a period especially near the end of the development cycle. The continuous, test-driven approach requires testing throughout the entire development cycle, yes I am talking about from the beginning to the end.
Creating new tests each time a developer creates a new feature, you no longer are required to reinvent the wheel with every single change, the test needs to be evolved with development so you no longer have to keep recreating scripts right from the scratch with every code change. Since designs are highly dynamic, and testing needs to be flexible.
Test Early, Test Often
Now many of you have this misconception, using a test-driven model means testing needs to be done early. In fact, this means testing has to be done often.
Testing needs to begin as soon as the very first development code is executed. Every iteration must be able to kick off another round of tests, making things easier as well as less-time-consuming. So once you are ready to successfully execute all the tests. You can seek assistance of BlazeMeter’s scheduling feature which ensures all the tests are executed at the right time, in simple words you don’t have to be at your keyboard all the time.
More importantly, chances are you need to leverage a wide range of tools for your continuous integration (CI) pipeline or continuous delivery (CD). BlazeMeter ensures easy integration using Jenkins, TeamCity, AWS CodePipeline, and others.
Communication needs to be open
The next best practice whether it is testing or development is communication. Yes, in any and every situation open communication is a must especially when you are conducting agile procedures. Since we all have been there, do you think email always gets a reply? Nope or a phone call, it can be lost to purgatory. Continuous testing mainly depends on fluid, cross-functional collaboration, this means communication bottlenecks are bound to sabotage the effort.
Both developers and testers need to work closely at each and every stage of the development cycle, from the earliest executable code to the final release. This means all the parties on board tend to have similar kinds of expectations in regards to how the app is successfully intended to function and the app is tested. In fact, this is the reason why testers these days are included in scrum meetings.
BlazeMeter turns out to be a comprehensive platform where it is possible to successfully empower collaboration and of course, this has the ability to share reports.
Continuous monitoring and reporting
Last but certainly not the least, test reports need to be monitored and reported on a constant basis.
Several tools show real-time reports with live results while tests being successfully executed, culminating in a final post-test report rich with analytics.
Lastly, make sure the performance test needs to be methodical as well as adaptable. So what are you waiting for, time to harness the power of continuous performance testing for your upcoming project. Make sure to embrace all the aforementioned practices, and nothing can stop you from making a positive impact in the software landscape. Time to adapt proactive performance testing.
Final words
So we are done for now! Continuous performance testing is worth taking into account; I am sure now you will also happen to agree with me. Unfortunately, for years, software testing was considered as an afterthought and sometimes ended up ignoring such a major step, which led to unwanted issues and bugs and the ultimate failure of the app development project.
However, this is no longer the case; software testing has become equally important, especially with the market becoming more and more saturated. Companies no longer have the luxury of postponing performance testing until the development procedure is completed, or should I say, the software is launched successfully.
Continuous performance testing has been gaining immense popularity with more and more teams realising its overall worth and impact. By doing so, it is possible to predict system capacity, enhance software quality, and cater to specific project needs. More or less, it doesn’t mean testing more but testing in a smarter manner, which means to automate early, making testing easily accessible, and integrating deeper into software delivery pipelines.
The following article gives you a complete perspective regarding what continuous performance testing is and how it is beneficial in the long run. I hope you did find the following post worth reading and sharing. If so, feel free to share among your peers and help us spread the word.
In case if you still have any kind of doubt or concerns, feel free to mention them in the comment section below. Good luck with your upcoming development project. I hope you now exactly know what you need to get things started.
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