Performance testing is a critical part of any testing strategy as it indicates the maximum user load the system can process, thereby, helping to mitigate the associated risks. It won’t be wrong to state that good performance of the application alone can help you stand out in the market. With the increasing focus on performance, organizations are moving their testing strategy from traditional approach to agile methodologies for creating successful products.
Conducting performance testing in an agile environment has its own benefits. Agile environment improves the application performance testing by executing tests on continuous integration and continuous delivery simultaneously, which is otherwise difficult with the conventional approach. It helps organizations develop higher quality software in less time while reducing the cost of development.
What Is Performance Testing? The Need to Test It in Agile Environment
With the increasing trend of digitization, the use of websites and mobile apps is increasing. Popular apps and websites like Netflix, Google Pay, etc., have millions of users all at the same time. The load created during the peak traffic period is immense; in case, the system fails to keep up the load, it can disrupt the business. To ensure that business continuity is uninterrupted while offering a seamless customer experience, even during unrealistic traffic, performance testing is conducted. Performance testing creates reliable software applications with great speed, stability, scalability, and responsiveness. It is one of the important criteria directly related to the user experience.
Organizations are adapting to creating new software in agile environment to improve the process, promote change, and embrace innovation. The agile environment offers a flexible space for the organizations to improve the process by emphasizing on the working software, developer/testers, customer collaboration, and responding to the changes. When performance testing is carried with the agile approach, it helps to deliver quicker results with better ROI.
The prime approach of using performance testing in an agile environment can be understood by considering the complete software development project. Moreover, the automation test scripts to run performance testing lets the organizations develop high-quality software in a lesser time frame with reduced developmental cost. It mainly focuses on testing the performance in the early stage of development and testing. Looking at the advantages offered by performance testing in an agile environment, performance testing gets consideration in the complete agile SDLC process. It also helps in testing the application behavior under heavy load.
Critical Considerations for Running Performance Testing in Agile Environment
When conducting performance testing using agile testing methodology, the application testing is conducted in smaller cycles. As a result of this trend, with every iteration, the application gets better than the previous release. The process is streamlined and also allows making any further change or addition of new requirements anytime. Key considerations include:
- Having a clear vision of the expected result is critical. Having a clear context set for the project will help you determine the further requirements such as building architecture, implementing new features, setting the timeline, and determining the scope of performance testing
- Determining the reason for performance testing by observing the trends in resource usage, checking threshold, responsiveness, and collating the data to plan for the required scalability
- Creating a strategy to incorporate performance testing value additions like integrating external resources, emphasizing on the concerned areas, checking the load range etc.
- Deciding the tools and resources to be used for syncing up with the test environment
- Identifying and executing the tasks are of highest priority criteria to decide the performance of the system
- Another important consideration involves creating and analyzing the report to check if the outcomes are as expected
Resolving Performance Issues in Agile Environment
To get maximum efficiency under an agile environment, one should identify and resolve the performance issues in the base code to avoid further bottlenecks. There are three stages to consider while resolving performance issues:
- Optimization: Tests should be implemented at the base level to avoid issues at a later stage
- Component Testing: It removes defects at the application component level
- App Flow Testing: It helps to test app flows that determine the UX consistency for varying loads
Different Factors That Affect Performance Testing Within Agile Environment
A performance tester gets involved from the beginning of the sprint so that quality products can get assured by the end of the development cycle, and delivery within the estimated timeline. Below are the different factors affecting the performance testing process:
- Non-availability of trained resources for critical projects
- Unavailability of flexible tools for performance testing
- No prioritization of performance testing to take care of performance defects
- Performance testing criteria might not be planned for every sprint in the case of some agile projects
Advantages of using Performance testing in Agile Environment
Performance testing in agile Environment has proved to be helpful for all organizations; its benefits include:
Capacity Management: It helps determine if the current hardware can handle a specific amount of traffic by identifying the capacity and size of the server required. It also helps in saving the investments made on private Cloud.
Testing Speed: It can be determined by mimicking the multiple scenarios and then testing the reactions of all those paths under different situations. In this way, all the significant flows and the user journeys can get tested for an application, even the unknown cases.
Increased Team Efficiency: Agile follows detailed planning and documentation, which can help in making the development process efficient and faster. It also helps in fixing the issues at a very early stage during development.
Competitive Advantage: These days, the end-users have a low tolerance for performance issues and bugs. Performance testing proves to be helpful in having a higher retention rate and demonstrating the company’s competitive advantage.
Yethi’s Performance Testing to Offer Seamless Experience
Yethi is a QA service provider to banks and financial institutions across the world. Highlighting Yethi’s performance testing process, our test automation tool, Tenjin, conducts the test efficiently to eliminate any performance issues and ensures that the application works at its best. It monitors and handles the test to check the response time, speed, scalability, and resource usage under the standard workload, thereby, creating a robust and scalable system that works without any disruption.
Yethi has helped several global banking/financial institutions with an easy and efficient test automation solution. Our revolutionary solution has changed the course of test automation by providing nearly 100% accuracy.