Hi there, welcome to performance testing. Over the next few minutes we're going to look at some strategies for planning and implementing performance testing. Because users are sensitive to slow or malfunctioning applications, organizations need to ensure that they are incorporating performance testing and load testing procedures as part of the building and deployment of applications.

While quick deployment of applications and solutions is important, what's even more important is the ability to deliver well-designed and while performing solutions that provide value to the end-users and to the organization.

Before talking about performance testing, it's important to understand the difference between performance testing and load testing. This is because performance testing is often confused with load testing but these are really two different concepts. Performance testing is used to see how responsive an application is, how stable it is, and how efficiently it uses the resources that are assigned to it. While load testing is used to test an application's performance when it's run under a load.

While it's expected that an organization's testing team should focus on features when designing a solution, it should also be noted that performance is in many ways a feature itself.

A common issue that organizations often run into is that more often than not performance testing only enters the equation after the development team is comfortable with the stability of the code. However, what should be happening is that the organization's performance testers should start running new code as soon as it's available. What this does is ensure feedback makes its way back to the developers sooner rather than later. This allows the developers to more quickly rectify issues.

During performance testing you should be looking at how long user actions take to complete within an application. You should also be working out how much load the solution can handle before things start going south. This might require you to identify where the bottlenecks are as the number of users increases or as the size of the data grows. You may also want to ensure that the application or solution can run for long periods of time without issues like memory leaks which can cause performance degradation.

That all being said it's important to utilize automated testing tools to perform this testing because it's impractical to perform any sort of meaningful performance testing or to integrate within a DevOps pipeline without a suite of automation tools.

Simply compiling a list of tools that you plan to use in your performance testing activities is not a plan. I mean sure it's a good idea but there's more involved. You need to also sort out how you're going to configure your testing environment and what testing processes you're going to use. You'll also need to define success and failure. What will success look like? What will failure look like?

There are also several questions that you need to answer. You'll need to understand the expectations of the business and the expectations of the target users. When creating a performance testing plan you'll also need to define the metrics that you plan to measure.

At the end of the day, it's critical that performance testing be included in your planning right from the start. If you'll be using a Kanban board it might be a good idea to have a space near it that can be used to plan out your testing strategy. Any gaps in your testing strategy should be highlighted during iteration planning and you should also sort out how you plan to monitor performance once a solution has been deployed.

 

Lectures

Introduction - Identifying & Recommending Quality Metrics - Feature Flags - Technical Debt - Team Structures - Performance Testing - Inspecting & Validating Code Base for Compliance - Inspecting & Validating Infrastructure for Compliance - Secure Development & Coding - Infrastructure Security Validation Tools & Practices - Conclusion