Creating a visually appealing website with seamless functionality is great, but if it crashes easily or fails to work under higher traffic, it can never be a successful one. Hence, performance testing is a crucial parameter when it comes to software testing. It gives a clear picture of how the website/ application is performing in terms of speed, thereby, offering scope to increase its robustness and reliability.

Performance testing is a rapidly developing field and has witnessed enormous advancements, especially in the recent years. Teams are trying to move to quicker, cheaper, agile, and more accessible methods to improve the performance testing process.

Like the previous years, this year too will witness new trends in performance testing that will enable more responsive development in shorter spans with fewer risks factors. The emerging trends in performance testing are discussed here in detail.

Latest trends in performance testing

The new trends in performance testing are still at a nascent phase and will make their presence in the market much sooner than we anticipate. Here are some of the popular testing trends that will transform software QA in the near future.

Artificial Intelligence

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in performance testing for websites and apps is not new. AI automation is slowly making its presence as a go-to option for testing and QA teams at every stage of performance testing.

The use of artificial intelligence in performance testing for websites and applications is expected to grow further in the upcoming years and become a significant trend of all time.

Internet Of Things Testing Market

The Internet of Things (IoT) has seen rapid growth in the last few years, and this growth is expected to continue in the future too at a larger scale. This means that there will be millions of devices operating in various unique environments. Testers will face new challenges to ensure that the testing cycle, performance, and security aren’t compromised. To mitigate these risks, testers will have to adopt an IoT-focused approach, leading to the rise of Cloud-based and IoT testing environments.

Cloud-based Testing

Cloud computing services are becoming popular for functional and non-functional software testing. There are a plethora of benefits of using Cloud-based tools for performance testing. Some of them are:

• High Scalability: With a Cloud-based platform, unlimited users can carry out performance testing simultaneously.
• Low Cost: It allows on-demand resource provisioning for performance testing for websites and software without the need of building infrastructure, thereby, helping reduce performance testing costs.
• Supports Production Environment Testing: Generally, traditional, older tools allow performance testing only in the test environment. However, with Cloud-based tools for performance testing, the testing can be carried out in the production environment as well.

Open-source Tools for Performance Testing

Open-source tools promote collaboration by giving testers the ability to view and edit the source code. This leads to the team working efficiently and helps create a better product while reducing the production cycle time. Additionally, they also provide an easy learning platform for new testers. No doubt that open-source performance testing tools have become quite popular in the testing community and will remain an integral part of it.

DevOps

DevOps is a collaborative approach combining Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops). It involves all the stakeholders in the software development process until the product is delivered to the client. DevOps aims to reduce the software development life cycle while delivering high-quality end-products to the client. To accomplish this, DevOps involves a highly interconnected, collaborative, and agile approach. Looking forward, DevOps seems to be the go-to approach for many organizations due to the various benefits it delivers.

Production Testing

Another emerging trend in performance testing is testing the software or website in the production environment. Generally, performance testing is done in the development, staging, and pre-production environments. However, in production testing, the new code changes are tested on live user traffic on the production software itself.

Production testing allows only a small set of users to be exposed to the software. The testing team then carries out performance testing for websites or applications and rolls out new features to check user responses. They can verify whether the software or website works as intended or not. Some of the techniques used for production testing include:

• A/B testing: Testers can compare two versions/features at the same time to see which one provides a better user experience.
• Blue-Green deployment: It involves running two production environments that are as identical as possible. It helps reduce downtime and risks as it enables gradual and safe transfer of user traffic from a previous version of the app or software to the new one.
• Security Testing: Data threats and attacks have increased in the last few years, resulting in tangible and intangible losses for every party involved. Thus, every stakeholder, including businesses, has realized the importance of data safety. Testing teams, too, have prioritized security testing in performance testing to avoid any undesired instances. The threats are expected to only increase as we steadily move to a more interconnected world. That is why software testing teams must become competent to detect and neutralize threats at the earliest.

Behavior-driven development

Behavior-driven development (BDD) is an agile approach that encourages collaboration with shared tools and processes to create a mutual understanding between testers on how the end-product will behave. In BDD, the testing team needs to build test cases based on user behavior and interactions to create a high-quality end-product. BDD is expected to gain further prominence as AI goes mainstream in performance testing.

These are the top emerging trends in performance testing that one should watch out for in the next few years. However, given the unprecedented changes, we might see the addition of these new trends much sooner in the future. Similarly, some of the emerging trends may vanish before they become mainstream due to various challenges in implementing them on a larger scale. Businesses, testers, and individuals will need to keep themselves updated about new developments in the industry to stay ahead of the curve.

Why choose Yethi for performance testing?

Yethi is a niche QA service provider for global banks and financial institutions that offers efficient end-to-end testing. Our flagship, Tenjin, is a codeless test automation platform that can carry out all aspects of functional and non-function testing with nearly 100% accuracy. Tenjin executes high-level performance testing to identify the responsiveness, availability, and scalability of the system. It performs multiple rounds of tests to check the consistency of the system. Our aim is to ensure that your application performs at its best even during increased, load, stress, and volume.