Performance testing is one of the key critical activities in SDLC for ensuring application speed and availability in production environment. There are many advantages of conducting performance testing ; out of which, following 7 are the very fundamental yet most important takeaways.
1) Response Time : Response time is synonymous with application speed and its predictability which primarily defines the performance rules of the application. Performance testing exercises capture the response time trend with various traffic situations which is used for NFR compliance assessment and SLA adherence.
2) Throughput : Throughput defines request processing bandwidth of the resources in a certain timeline while meeting the predefined SLA. Performance bench-marking is the appropriate way to translate the processing capability into hard facts regarding expected throughput.
3) Diagnose & Tune : Identifying performance bottlenecks is one of the major steps towards building a robust application. High volume stress testing immensely help to diagnose performance issues under the hood and it also creates right opportunity to fine tune the application for optimal performance. Diagnose and tuning exercises help in achieving application stability & availability.
4) Capacity Planning : Application scalability is derived from the capacity of individual components and the correlation among those components of the system. Performance break-point testing finds out the processing threshold of system components at various conditions and lays out the foundation for capacity planning to address SLA needs, traffic requirements etc.
5) Contingency Planning : Contingency plan is a mandatory process for every critical application. Various advanced performance testing methodologies such as FMEA/FMECA/Resiliency Testing etc. help in capturing various KPIs ; both qualitative & quantitative analysis are conducted on the KPIs which provide valuable insights during formulation of contingency plan.
6) TCO : Application performance issues in production environment result in unnecessary cost of operation due to critical severity incidents which in turn call for fire fighting activities by engaging various teams. An appropriate performance testing strategy cuts down unnecessary expenses significantly and improves the total-cost-of-ownership. One more positive impact of performance testing on TCO is because of improved ROI, which in turn results due to maximization of infra resource utilization with optimal capacity planning.
7) Customer Experience : Application performance is as critical as business offerings from customer experience standpoint. Customer experience can be enhanced by understanding and managing the customer expectation. Customer expectation revolves around the speed , stability and predictability of application which can be achieved with help of appropriate performance testing exercises . Great customer experience boosts the competitive advantage of the application and aligns the SDLC process with strategic goal of the organization.
We hope you can certainly take this idea to your stakeholders and make them understand the need of building a must to have application performance strategy. Please keep me posted with your comments/suggestions/questions.
Stay tuned for the upcoming post on 10,000 Ft’ Overview of Performance Testing and Engineering terminologies !!
