Performance Testing: An Ideal Process for Successful Applications

Mobile applications are in high demand. Almost every business has a web or mobile application that helps to reach out to customers.

What makes a mobile application great and popular? Is it the graphics, fonts, or the user interface? Well, all these aspects are equally important to make an application successful. However, all these and other factors of an application come together to make it functional, and that’s when it becomes widely popular.

Each application has something different to offer to its customer, but one thing that remains common in every application is its functionality. You need to make your application functional and usable if you want your customers to approve of it.

For this, you need to conduct performance testing.

Significance of Performance Testing

Customers regularly send their feedback to companies regarding the complication in the functionality of their apps. It is due to the lack of efficiency in  performance testing.

You would agree with the fact that mobile application testing is important to gain user confidence. There are different stages of mobile testing through which your application needs to pass. Performance testing for mobile application is a testing stage where your application is tested for its performance against certain workloads. This process is more concentrated on the non-functional aspects of the application and more focused on how it will perform in certain situations.

Performance testing allows measuring the reliability, compatibility, and speed of the application. According to the programming of the application, there are different performance tests. For instance, react performance testing is done for applications written in React.js.

Similarly, there are different approaches for performance testing, like the white or black-box approach. With the white box technique, you can see how the codes are executed and improve wherever necessary. The black box approach will allow you to simulate users and transactions and how the application will react to them.

Recommended Post: Performance And Load Testing for Mobile Applications

Types of Performance Testing

There are many forms of performance testing that are done according to user requirements. It depends on you to choose the ideal testing:

Load Testing

This is done to detect the behavior of the application under peak load and normal load conditions. This testing is done to ensure the application’s performance meets the desired level of user expectations and focuses on: –

• Checking functionality issues
• Checking the hardware environment for accuracy
• Detecting the number of users the application can support in a certain load

Stress Testing

Stress testing is conducted to check whether the application will withstand the failures or become vulnerable. If it is the latter, then to what extent and under what conditions is something that will be determined. The major aim of this test is to determine the bugs, memory leaks, synchronization issues, along with the following –

• Detecting data corruption during the failure
• Detecting the load amount when the application fails or becomes slow
• Identifying the monitoring triggers to warn performance inefficiency
• Finding the actions to be performed for redirection

Capacity Tests

This is similar to stress tests and quantifies the number of users and transactions that can be supported before the application fails. This process is mainly used to detect the overall capacity of the application as follows –

• Determine workloads and the method of redirection
• Determine actual usage and capacity
• Perform multiple tests to compare capacity planning

Also read: Challenges in Performance Testing On Mobile Devices

What are the Goals of Performance Testing?

The major goal of performance testing is to ensure whether the application is performing up to the expectation or how it will perform under certain conditions. This test is conducted to check the usability of the application and check whether it will be successful or not.

The goals of performance testing vary according to the user requirements and the company’s objective. However, there are some common goals of this test:

• It helps in determining whether the application will be covering the performance requirements to meet the user needs
• It checks whether the application will be able to avoid failures due to the big workloads
• It ensures the capacity of the application can be increased according to situations without affecting its performance
• It checks whether the hardware that will be used for the application will be enough to maintain its performance
• It helps in detecting the early bugs and issues that may compromise the performance of the application
• It checks the number of users and transactions the application can hold in intense workloads

Also check: Best practices for Application Performance Testing

In Conclusion

The performance of an application is what sustains its position in the market. If an application is vulnerable to workloads and failures, customers will never be able to trust it again. Hence, it is important to focus on performance testing that ensures the utmost functionality, usability, and stability of your application. You need to conduct performance testing at the right time to ensure your application is user-ready. The above mentioned were some of the key information regarding performance testing that will help you understand its significance.

FAQs

Q1. What are some performance bottlenecks that you can fix with performance testing?

A1. Some common bottlenecks include:

• Memory Utilization
• Browser Emulation
• Disk Usage
• Network Utilization
• CPU Utilization.

Q2. What are the common problems you can find through performance tests?

A2. 

Poor Scalability

Poor scalability is when the software can't handle the set number of tasks leading to delay in results, increased errors, and unexpected behavior affecting CPU usage, memory leaks, disk usage, and other things.

Bottlenecking

Bottlenecks happen when there is an interruption or halt in data flow due to a lack of capacity to handle the workload.

Insufficient hardware resources

Through performance testing, you can identify problems with low-performing CPUs and physical memory constraints.

Software configuration issues

Performance testing helps you identify settings not set at an appropriate level to handle workloads

Q3. What metrics do you measure in performance testing

A3. Developers use the following metrics often:

• Wait Time
• Average Load Time
• Response Time
• Error Rate
• Response Time

Q4. In performance testing, what is throughput?

A4. Throughput is the amount of data transported to the server in response to client requests. We calculate throughput in terms of hits per second, daily calls, reports per year, or similar. The higher the throughput value, the better the performance of an application.