A Practitioner’s Approach to Performance Testing
A Practitioner's Approach to Performance Testing
The application is horribly slow.", "I don't get the response even after I get my coffee.", "This application is useless". Sounds familiar? How many times have we heard these quotes or or felt like that ourselves? The common thread between these statements is that the performance of the application is not good.
Performance - the (in)famous buzzword. What is it? What does it mean? In this article, we'll touch upon what is involved in testing an application for performance.
With every passing day, organizations are becoming more and more conscious about the performance of their Enterprise Solutions. As the IT industry matures and the technology evolves, so does the awareness about expectations from an Enterprise Application.
Focusing just on the design / implementation and Zero-functional-defect solutions are things of the past. With increasing maturity in technology and IT staff, the 'Non-functional' aspects of the system are fast becoming focus-areas.
So what exactly are the non-functional aspects and/or requirements?
Non-functional requirements (NFRs) tell the IT team, about the kinds of usage and load the application will be subjected to, and the expected response time. We'll go into the details of this "response time" shortly.
NFRs define the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the system and hence the overall Performance of the Enterprise Application. Besides performance SLAs, NFRs also cover several other aspects, such as security, but for this article we are concerned with performance related objectives only.
Managing and ensuring the NFRs (SLAs) for an Enterprise Application is called Performance Engineering. Performance engineering is a vast discipline in itself which includes Performance Modeling, Performance Prototyping, Performance Testing, different types of analyses, Performance Tuning, etc. This article will not explain Performance Engineering, Queuing Theory and the science behind the various laws. This article just covers the basics about the Performance Engineering and key activities in Performance Testing. [....]
