Fundamentals of Web Performance Testing
Software development, as a profession, has evolved in fits and starts through the years. At first, that might look like sloppiness. But don’t forget that stakes were considerably lower in the time.
Building upon all this backstory, we’ve seen the rise of DevOps movement in recent years. This movement emphasizes automating the whole delivery pipeline, from written code to production functioning. So stakes for automatic testing are greater than ever. The only means to automate the whole thing is to get bulletproof verification.
This new energetic shines a light in an oft-ignored part of this testing approach. I’m speaking specifically about web performance testing for your web application. Automated unit and acceptance testing have since become a de facto standard. But now automated performance testing is getting there.
Consider it. We got burnt by hand-editing code onto the production server. So we put up sandboxes and tested manually. Our applications grew too complex for manual testing to handle. We assembled test suites and automated these tests. We had production rolls more often so that we automated the deployment process.
Now, we push code efficiently through construct, test, and installation. But we don’t know how it will behave in the wild.
If you do not have such a strategy, you will need one. And I will keep this general enough to be relevant to your tech pile, whatever it may be.
Know Your Production Conditions
First up, you have some assignments. You have to determine what kinds of conditions your application will actually face in creation. Evidently, you’ll have an easier time of this if you’ve already released it. However, in either case, determine what normal requirements and peak conditions look like.
You’re doing so to prep for different kinds of web performance testing you’ll do. You can also increase the load to the point of breaking to see what you can deal with.
With stress testing, you throw undesirable conditions at your app to see how it behaves. You want to verify that, even when it fails, it does so pretty and gracefully. With endurance testing, you observe behavior over the course of time, instead of with unusually heavy load.
All of these various tests involve simulating possible production requirements and testing the behavior. So you need to understand what to expect in production.
Establish Your Test Environment
As soon as you’ve completed your due diligence, you have to start in earnest. Along with your first job will involve really setting up your environment for analyzing.
Conceptually, this may differ in the previous setups. In years past you’ve mainly concerned yourself by all of the software somewhere neutral. In other words, provided that you examine it somewhere besides a developer’s machine, you are probably good. Once deployed into your surroundings, you execute tests to verify the correctness of functionality.
Web performance testing requires something different. Here, you have to simulate creation to the very best of your skill. In the minimum, this will mean beefier servers. Based upon your business, you might have to put in requests and requisition machines. If you can, try leveraging cloud technology to make your life easier.
But whatever you do, work out how to get as close to production as possible.
Simulation Strategy
As soon as you have a manufacturing testing house for your app, you still have a job to do. You are going to need to determine how to stimulate production conditions for load and stress tests. How do you go about throwing thousands or thousands of requests in your app?
You don’t want to get it done by paying hordes of developers, testers, and data entry folks to perform it manually. Seriously, please do not do this. We’re not talking about a fantastic ole’ fashioned bug celebration here. We’re talking about a simulation of exposing your app to the world wide web.
Now you have an environment and tooling for the testing; then you need to automate the operation. I am referring to another type of automation compared to the last section. That entailed automating the simulated requests and use scenarios. I’m speaking now about automating the larger picture.
As part of your deployment pipeline, you have to automate deployment for this performance testing atmosphere. You’ll then need to automate the kickoff of the performance tests, in addition to the recording of the outcome, along with passes and fails. Do not underestimate the sophistication here, particularly in the event of any endurance testing you may do.
