Why Do We Need Performance Testing?

March 24 23:00 2011 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

Note: the article was updated in June 2018.

The digital technologies are improving with every single day. This fact has made modern customers very demanding in the question of technology they choose. They demand that the software they use possess excellent speed and high-level performance features.

Users will definitely get frustrated if the application slows down due to the traffic increment. Indeed, the variety of products available in the market nowadays are really huge. So, if customers are not fully satisfied with one product, they will easily choose another. Well-conducted performance testing can protect software from such scenario.

Purpose of performance testing

To determine productivity
On the basis of the results of performance testing, you can make a conclusion whether software capacities or production configuration should be improved.

To find out the response time
Response time is a period of time measured between an initial request from a user till the ultimate response from the server. It is necessary to make as short as possible in order to satisfy users’ needs and ensure positive user experience.

To make optimizations
After well-conducted performance testing, it is easy to determine which parts of the application require optimization and sometimes even modifications.

To improve load capability
Most of the users expect an application to load within several seconds. If loading requires much time, users probably will quit and find an alternative. Performance testing examines load capabilities and detects the places where they should be improved.

To ensure usability
As far as performance testing helps to imitate real user experience, it can give a valuable insight about the discrepancy of users’ expectations and real performance.

To detect memory leaks
Memory leaks can cause gradual system slowdowns or even crashes. It is very easy to omit them and never notice until loading testing.

To check reliability
Performance testing checks system stability under different circumstances, thus, providing a good understanding of its reliability in various situations.

To detect bottlenecking
A bottleneck is an obstruction in a system which degrades overall system performance. Bottlenecking happens because of coding errors or hardware issues, which cause a decrease of throughput under certain loading.

QATestLab believes that performance and load testing activities should be used at early stages of the software development life cycle in order to follow performance related requirements and configure the test design and the development efforts as well. Updated informantion about performance testing you can find here. Also, watch our webinar dediacted to specifics of peromence and penetration testing and ways to select proper QA vendor.