A Beginners Guide to Web Performance Testing

Introduction to Performance Testing Overview

Applications released to the audience with enhanced complexity each day and done so using shorter development cycles. This needs an embrace of Agile development and web performance. Performance, as part of the global user experience, is now the main determinant of application quality.

This plan is no longer adequate by today’s application quality standards. This blog series will produce practical data on how to perform effective web performance testing in this new and more difficult environment.

One of the main operators behind this shift to new load testing is the increasing complexity of the IT landscape:

• Most users are using mobile,  customers, tablets, and other tools to access data.
• Complex architecture(s), concurrently shared by several applications, is being built.
• New technologies offer an array of solutions (AJAX framework, Rich Internet Application (RIA), WebSocket, and more) directed at promoting the applications’ user experience.
• Historically, applications have been examined to verify quality across diverse areas: functional, performance, security, etc. Testing phases respond to user requirements and business risks. However, the dialogue has changed; the discussion is no longer about quality; it’s about user experience. The user experience is a blend of look-and-feel, stability, security, and performance.

Performance: Imperative to a strong User Experience

Performance is the representative in the success of the user experience. This is due to improvements in technology, design complexity, and the locations/networks of the users. Load testing was an excellent addition to the development method but has swiftly become an essential testing step. 

When an application exceeds web performance testing but then fails in production, it is often due to unreliable testing. In these cases, it’s an easy but misguided charge to point at the testing itself or the tools used to execute it. 

The typical problem remains with test design, particularly when done without an accurate basis. It’s important to ask, “what did we need to understand which, if we had the data ahead of time, would have enabled us to predict this failure before creation?

States of a Load Testing Project

Methodologies like Agile and DevOps support for application production to quickly address customers’ needs. The methods of updating project organization need closer collaboration between teams. 

Within these methodologies, the project lifecycle is split out into different sprints, each responsible for producing a part of the application. In this environment, the performance testing method should follow a particular workflow.

A web performance testing approach should be implemented at an early stage of the project lifecycle. The first step: Performance Qualification. This represents the testing effort of the entire project. An “Old School” way to performance testing would force the project to wait for an accumulated application before performance validation would begin. 

In a modern project life cycle, the only way to incorporate performance validation in an early stage is to test unique elements after each build and execute end-to-end web performance testing once the application is assembled.