The Basis of Performance Testing

January 06 07:45 2017 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

There were many articles, describing the core of performance checking during test activity. Now it is time to look at the upside, trying to understand the essence of this type of testing via the terms and categories appropriate for it.

Usually, performance includes many types of test procedures among which there are stress testing, load and performance control, scalability testing, smoke and spike tests, and many others. But first of all, it is necessary to define some specific terms that accompany performance testing.

The Key Terminology Is:

Workload – an application undergoes testing in situations appropriate for diverse usage scenarios.
Throughput – some actions that are executed per a certain period of time (e.g., reports per week).
Scalability – this shows how the system under test is able to carry an additional workload.
Smoke testing – this checking helps to view how the system behaves under the normal level of load.
Saturation tests – conducted with using the big number of messages, aimed to detect errors which occur very rarely and may be caused by rare matches.
Metrics – the indicators of the system performance which are usually received, according to results of load testing.
Endurance test – this type of performance testing determines whether an application under test may permanently handle the required load during the specified period of time.
Capacity testing – fulfilled in order to estimate the level at which with load increasing the system under test may not ensure the required performance.