Why Software needs a performance testing strategy?

Suppose you have built a killer software that has been approved by your customer with smiles and handshakes and got enthusiastic thumbs-ups from your beta testers. Besides, you must eliminate potential glitches in your software before they could affect the application’s performance. At this stage, you need a thorough performance testing strategy to ensure the software meets the client’s requirements and scales with end-users’ needs.

The Need for Performance Testing

Before you request a performance testing strategy, you must know the key objectives of performance testing services. Having specific performance testing goals in your mind will help you focus on key areas of improvement and achieve the desired outcomes.

Moreover, pre-defined performance testing objectives result in a better evaluation of software performance and enable you to make informed decisions. Given below are some of the key objectives of software performance testing:

• To validate system speed.
• To establish parameters for future regression testing.
• To ensure compliance with performance goals and requirements.
• To define key metrics for the application like workload, response time, throughput, and resource utilization.

Benefits of a Performance Testing Strategy

A rigorous software performance strategy helps your team organize the development-related tasks effectively and identify performance issues early. Similarly, you can experiment with various failure and recovery scenarios with an execution strategy that enables you to identify the impact of failure and eliminate any kinds of glitches in the application.

Additionally, you can never ensure the application meets the client’s requirements and business needs unless it is built on a thorough performance testing strategy.

Creating a Rigorous Performance Testing Strategy

To create a comprehensive software performance testing strategy, follow the given steps.

Outline the App’s Key Features

Discuss the key features with your client before launching the app for better results. First of all, you should review traffic analytics for your application by cooperating with your technical team and product owners. This step will provide you with useful information about typical usage patterns that can be used to start performance testing.

Estimate the Anticipated User Load

For projects with multiple production releases, the statistics should provide key details about the peak level of user traffic and the approximate number of users accessing the application. The next step after identifying the key features of your application, you should estimate the predicted user load.

If the predicted load is higher than expected, seek approval from the product owner and use multiple web servers for collecting precise results from the performance tests. The involvement of the product owner is important to get further insight into the varying user count over time, and the users’ concurrency.

Collaboration

Document all details about the performance testing strategy to get a better understanding of the software’s functionality. Once you have outlined the app’s key features and estimated the anticipated user load, the last step is to include strategic testers as a part of technical teams.

Also mention workload criteria, script development, and test execution process that incorporates the pre-test checklist and collection of results. These results provide your technical team with meaningful indicators of improvement that can be used to enhance the quality of your software. A pre-defined and well-organized performance testing strategy should include a project description, key objectives, scope, software & hardware requirements, and metrics.