What is Performance Testing Services?

What is Performance Testing Services?


One of the toughest challenges organizations face today involves achieving and maintaining their business's mission-critical applications at peak performance and scalability levels.

Without an effective methodology for predicting system behaviour and performance under real life stress conditions, they are exposed to the types of catastrophic application slowdowns and failures that cripple productivity, drive away customers and decimate the company's bottom line.

Even when poor performance gets captured in the testing phase, the solution often taken involves throwing additional hardware at the problem, a very expensive and wasteful use of financial resources. As such it becomes imperative that businesses effectively engineer their systems for peak performance.

Software Performance Testing experts assure whether a system's performance meets its goals and requirements, now and in the future. In this series of Articles on Performance Testing Services, we are going to focus on six core activities while rendering Performance Engineering. This Article talks about the most important activity, i.e. the information Gathering process.  Remain glued to this space for subsequent articles on other core services related to Performance Testing. The Articles are written by Performance Testing expert.

Performance engineers get busy very early in the project's System Development Life Cycle gathering the vital information necessary for successful performance testing of any software or application. Arguably, this information gathering phase is the most critical phase in the project for the performance engineer, as it is the foundation upon which performance tests are built. And it's a process that continues throughout the project's SDLC.


Once assigned to a project, it is important the performance engineer contact the application project manager for all available written documentation on the project. Among the documents commonly available are Requirements document, Project Plans, Specifications, Marketing material, Contracts, Staffing information, Project schedules, Budget, and so on. Such documentation is essential for the performance engineer to get a feel for the project, the effort required and possible constraints.


In conjunction with gathering the key business documents, PEs should contact the project architect and/or infrastructure folks to obtain system architecture diagrams, for both the production and the test environments. These documents will be used down the road to help identify any test environment related risk and/or constraints. Through these documents, as well as conversation with the project manager, we establish the type of Performance Testing Services required for the project. It indicates for example whether our purpose is testing for normal and peak loads for a new application, or for a new release of an existing application. This knowledge clues us as to the direction and effort needed to collect accurate data, response times, throughput and resource utilization information. Whereas such data may be readily available for an existing application, working with a new application involves estimates that must be accurately quantified if our testing is to have value.

On the other hand, some projects are designed for capacity planning purposes. Here, anticipating future increases in customers and user activity, the goal becomes finding failure points in our infrastructure and determining the necessary hardware, software and configurations need to meet these projections.

Software Performance Testing can also focus on gauging the effect of infrastructure or environment changes, to assure our applications perform according to expected requirements.Lastly, a project goal may entail addressing and resolving an already identified performance issue.Once the written documentation has been gathered and reviewed the PE is armed with enough information to meet the project team to begin the performance requirements gathering process.

The fact that we focus on Performance Engineering, and not just limit ourselves to Performance Testing Services, distinguishes  in the industry. Expert Test Engineers work closely with clients and help configure a performance testing environment that accurately simulates production. The team follows up with timely and efficient testing, monitoring, in-depth analysis and tuning recommendations. Software Performance Testing is a complete package that ensures the most cost-effective, efficient and comprehensive solution to your performance needs.

Author:QAInfoTech
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