How to Shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering and Why You Should Do So
Slow product performance can lead to many negative consequences, from user dissatisfaction to customers loss. Performance testing is often not enough to uncover all hidden issues before a product’s release.
In this case, performance engineering comes to the aid. This approach is aimed at resolving performance-related issues at the early stages of the SDLC or avoiding them altogether.
What is performance testing?
Software performance testing is a quality assurance (QA) practice designed to examine the speed, scalability, and stability of your solution. Its goal is to make sure that a user will be comfortable interacting with your product despite heavy loads. Performance tests help you to:
- Validate that software satisfies performance requirements by emulating the load specified in requirements and checking software behavior.
- Identify key performance issues and bottlenecks due to extensive testing under various conditions and loads.
- Improve user satisfaction with the end product by checking that users will not experience issues with software functionality.
- Avoid interference with other development stages, since performance testing is isolated from the rest of the software development lifecycle.
Why is performance testing not enough for your project?
If performance testing is so efficient, why do many solutions still freeze when we need them the most? Partly it’s because of errors in the performance tests themselves. But performance testing also has drawbacks and limitations you can’t fix. Here are the key ones:
What is performance engineering?
Software performance engineering is an approach to software development and testing that introduces continuous performance assessment and improvement processes throughout the product development cycle.
It focuses on development with performance in mind from the moment your team starts working on the product. Performance engineering fits well in Agile development and shift-left testing.
The performance engineering process consists of four key stages:
1. Architecture and modeling.
2. Performance diagnostics and profiling.
3. Performance testing.
4. Monitoring system capacity.
What are the benefits of implementing performance engineering?
Being a complex approach to ensuring software performance, performance engineering helps businesses catch performance-related issues early and fix them at a relatively low cost. Here’s how performance engineering can help your business:
1. Continuous improvement of the user experience. Performance engineering allows your team to control product performance during all development stages and after the software release.
2. Ability to save money for fixing productivity issues. The cost of fixing the same bug varies depending on the time when the bug is discovered, and performance engineering helps to discover bugs earlier.
3. Reduced infrastructure costs. Performance engineering helps you predict the load on your system and determine which resources it will need to scale and when it will need them.
4. Possibility to use modern development approaches. You can easily fit performance engineering into the continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) lifecycle, DevSecOps, Agile, Lean development, etc.
5. Fewer performance issues after release. The release of the final product is often a stressful time for the project team.
How to adopt performance engineering?
It’s best to implement performance engineering right at the start of a new project so you can add its principles to the foundation of your software. Adding it in the middle or the end of your project’s SDLC may bring more challenges than benefits.
When starting a new project, you can introduce performance engineering with these five steps:
Explore these five steps in debth from the full article on Apriorit’s professional blog.
Final thoughts
Shifting from performance testing to performance engineering helps businesses deliver high-quality software, ensure a smooth user experience, and reduce the cost of development and system infrastructure.
QA experts and developers at Apriorit pay a lot of attention to ensuring the performance of our solutions. We carefully elicit all performance-related requirements, take them into account when designing the system architecture, and constantly watch out for arising issues.
