Performance testing. Why should be included in software testing?

Load tests seek to measure the behavior of the application under expected use parameters, such as the number of concurrent users expected in the production environment.

Stress tests are focused on determining the maximum system capacity. This is achieved, for instance, gradually increasing the number of simultaneous users to the limit, that is, until the system fails. This type of test allows knowing how the system achieved to recover from a failure scenario.

Stability tests are used to check the performance of the application during prolonged use. The idea is to subject the application to a load, within the parameters of normal use, for a long time and evaluate the performance of all components.

During the execution of the tests described above, the technology and infrastructure specialists perform the monitoring of response times, use of server resources, database performance, network usage (CPU, RAM ), etc., to identify bottlenecks, memory leaks or another possible point of failure that prevents the desired behavior of the application.

In addition to this, the test results provide us with accurate information about the platform capacity and infrastructure, allowing the developer to validate attributes such as scalability and reliability of the application.

To achieve these objectives, the tests must be performed in a stable version of the application and an environment with similar characteristics to production.

Performance testing should always be included in a software quality process because they allow us to evaluate the system from a perspective that is not possible with functional tests.

A performance issue that is not detected early, can be so simple that a software engineer can solve in a few minutes or may involve the refactoring of the application code.

At Teravision, we will be glad to help you with your automated or functional software testing.