Exploring the Need for Holistic Performance Test Strategies
While maintaining the agility required to accommodate software development’s market needs, testers are increasingly being tasked with ensuring that product and service quality are not compromised.
Of the various attributes that testers target, performance continues to be a very important piece of the pie. Performance test strategies must be nimble and robust enough to try new approaches to meet the need of the day.
First, start early. Performance is no longer an afterthought. Gone are the days when performance testing commenced only after functional testing was completed. Engaging early forces the team to think about performance—not just from a numbers standpoint but also from design and architecture standpoints—in order to help bring down the total cost of quality.
When agile methodologies were new to the market, performance testing was often an activity that stretched across sprints. In recent times, with an increased focus on iterative development, performance testing has become a sprint-contained activity that draws the attention of cross disciplines and then leads to full immersion. This gets developers, business teams, and deployment engineers all thinking of performance up front.
For a tester, a holistic view of the performance test strategy is vital. You focus not just on the current release but also on previous releases, unaddressed performance defects, end user reported issues, and external-facing performance numbers of competitors, including page load times (PLT) and application availability.
These approaches help compare competitor performance numbers against your product, while enabling you to learn from your competition’s successes and failures. From an implementation standpoint, performance testing should never be done purely in an automated manner. A combination of manual and exploratory techniques is often used to bring in a holistic touch.
It is important to plan for a mobile-focused performance verification, based on your product’s needs. In-browser specific rendering tests are becoming necessary as end users access more content from mobile devices—devices whose processing power is much lower than PCs and laptops.
As newer test implementation techniques grow in importance, existing tools may not always scale well. The market is flooded with tool options, including open source solutions that cover the whole spectrum—from E2E performance testing tools to simpler ones such as PLT measuring options. Periodically explore the right mix of tools to add to your testing kit.
And finally, it always helps to stay on top of trends. Studies that focus specifically on performance testing trends are periodically published, and these are often excellent sources of information for a tester to build an ideal test strategy that is both practical and overarching in nature.
