Here at our blog you will find no shortage of exhortations, arguments, and advocacy for testing in general and performance testing more specifically.

Why is testing so important?

  • Testing is an investment in quality
  • Defects are expensive to fix
  • Defects are more expensive to fix the later they’re found.
  • Performance testing ensures the system your organization depends on will provide an equally high-quality user experience when there are many concurrent users as when there is only one.

For the sake of brevity, let’s assume you’re already sold on performance testing.

“SO YOU’VE DECIDED TO PERFORMANCE TEST”

There are some things you need to know, some pitfalls to avoid.

  • Performance Testing takes planning!  It’s not something to be tacked on at the end. There are several reasons to integrate the performance testing effort right at the start, and keep at it till go-live and beyond.
    1. Performance testing is not like taking your temperature or even a Covid test. Performance testing requires a scripted program that plays the role of many concurrent users putting your application through its paces, and recording the time it takes the system to deliver.
    2. It takes time to get the scripts in place. They need to be recorded and they need to be maintained. The best way to do it is to script the use cases as soon as they’re created.
  • Bugs are cheaper to fix when they’re found early. When the performance test team puts a load on a use case in isolation as it’s rolled out, there are two main advantages.
    1. When a performance problem is found early it’s easier to remediate.
    2. It’s easier to diagnose performance issues in isolation, rather than amidst the noise of a test running many simultaneous activities.
  • Fundamental problems are difficult to remedy once the structure is built. When building a house, we don’t go back and fix the foundation at the END. Testing in parallel with development catches problems early. Once the problem is baked in, it can be very time consuming to unravel.

The optimal mindset for performance testing is to recognize:

  • Testing is part of development
  • Performance testing is part of testing
  • Like other investments – the time allotted to testing pays off in reduced headaches later
  • Bugs, dissatisfied customers, and system hardware have real costs – proper testing can reduce them all.

Don’t treat testing as an afterthought

  • “We’re going live next week, can you get in for a performance test? [Hint: No.]
  • Don’t assume it’s easy: “I’ll just bone up on it instead of 3 projects I’m already on!”
  • Don’t forget what you’ve asked for – a software project within a software project.
  • Testing, like development, is iterative.

VPS is different from other testing teams in that all our testers have a background in software engineering, and thus they will be able to provide more guidance and insight into remediation and application architecture. We provide more than just bad news!

At VPS we’re passionate about testing. Let’s talk about it!

Author

Chris Burgoyne

I am a project manager at Vision Point Systems, where for the past 15 years I have worked on a wide variety of custom software projects. From web site development to Telco and IVR implementations to custom Android and iOS mobile apps, our teams have delivered high value solutions to our clients.

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