Software Testing has become an integral part of the application development processes worldwide. The past decade has seen Testing emerge as a significant, and in fact, an inevitable part of software development. There has also emerged various classification of testing to ensure the right leverage. Out of all these, performance testing leads the way. However, many software testing professionals might still lack complete knowledge and practice of the full coverage of an application’s Performance Testing.
They tend to overlook Performance Testing from the different lenses of – the client and the server. Wondering what’s the difference? Before jumping to action, testers need to take a step back, understand the different aspects to an application, view it from each of those scenarios and prepare a test plan that covers a 360-degree assurance.
What is Performance Testing?
Performance testing is used for evaluating the performance of an application in terms of responsiveness, scalability, bandwidth usage, data transfer, scalability, process time, and application output speed. An application that works seamlessly across network shifts and load is one that qualities Performance Testing efficiently.
Effective Performance Testing means Slicing It Down into two sides:
- Client Side
- Server Side
Client-side Performance testing
Here testers validate the performance of client-side application with different metrics. Main job is to evaluate the end-to-end process and how application is behaving in that environment. Is the application having delays in rendering front end elements? or any problem occurs while loading the CSS and JavaScript files. We also determine if technology needs any modifications.
We have certain key performance indicators (KPIs), also known as performance testing metrics, that are used to measure the effectiveness of this testing method. These KPIs define the effectiveness of the performance tests for businesses.
KPI’s
- Speed Index – This calculates time in which page content populates visibly correct.
- Time to interact (TTI) – TTI is the time taken by an application to become fully interactive. A good TTI score for displaying useful content and responsiveness is between 0 and 7.3 milliseconds.
- Load time –This measures the time taken from clicking on any link to load the whole page. This can also help in determining search engine ranking and customer satisfaction.
- Page Size – This is the overall size of the webpage.
- CPU Idle time – This measures the time in which CPU remains idle and waiting for third-party application responses.
There are many ways to improve client-side performance such as compressed Images and JS code, fast response time, better cache techniques, minimizing content, and sizing the hardware accurately.
Server-side Performance testing
Server-side performance has a direct impact on any application. Here, testers can make changes directly on the server side to see the effect, and the scope is not limited to simpler tests, in fact, includes evaluating logical scenarios, application’s behavior under user load, and server response time. This can also help in evaluating complex variations e.g., algorithms, and architectures that are commonly used in modern applications.
We must evaluate this with the correct KPIs while performing complex tests as compared to the client side where tests are simpler e.g., related to UI.
KPI’s
- Error rates – This is the percentage of failed requests as compared to overall requests sent.
- Requests per second (RPS) – RPS is the number of requests sent which results in getting information from the system such as search engine calls per second.
- Thread Counts – This is the continuous requests sent to the server and can be measured during any particular given time.
- Peak Response time – Time taken for any request from start till getting response from the server. Here the longest cycle will be considered rather than taking an average.
- Throughput – This is the total number of requests that an application can handle per second.
- Bandwidth – This is the maximum number of data that is transferred in any network per second.
Conclusion
For any application to be successful, Performance is the key indicator and this should not be compromised at any level. This should be covered in the plan during the requirements development phase which is before designing. Contact us for more details.