Why we need performance testing in software testing?

Today, every enterprise wants quality software that not only performs well but also provides a great user experience. Therefore, businesses conduct performance and load testing to ensure that the software product works under all load conditions and gives a great experience to users. Let’s now look at this testing type in more detail.

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What is performance testing?

It is a non-functional software testing type that involves testing the software or an application to determine how the current system is performing. This test is done to check how the system responds under varying workload conditions.

This test ensures that the application performs as expected irrespective of the conditions like network fluctuations, bandwidth availability, or traffic load. This testing process determines the speed with which the system works and some of the issues identified with this type of testing are runtime bloat, optimization issues related to speed, latency, throughput, poor response times, load balancing problems, and other bandwidth issues if any.

Why is performance testing needed in software testing?

Below mentioned are some of the reasons that will help you to understand why this type of software testing is needed:

1. Mobile applications usually face a lot of issues with the network, especially in the situation when the server is congested. Some issues that are commonly seen in applications are –
2. Images downloading errors
3. Broken images.
4. Content related issues
5. Booking, payment, or checkout errors
6. Frequent timeouts
7. Application Freezing
8. Uploads/Download failures, etc.
9. Slow-loading websites or applications annoy users and this can result in lost revenue and customer
10. Businesses need to ensure that the applications work well after release and provide a great UX. With the help of this test, businesses can ensure that the application performs the same way as it claims
11. To keep pace with the fast-changing technology the apps are upgraded from time-to-time. To ensure that the apps work well with new technology, this testing is needed
12. The speed of the application changes as per the regions. To ensure that the app can be used by customers across the world conveniently, this testing is needed
13. This test helps to determine the scalability, speed, and stability of the system if a load of concurrent users is increased suddenly

What are the types of Performance Testing?

Below mentioned are the common types of tests that come under this testing method:

1. Load Testing: It is performed to check how the system performs under normal (usually around 70% of peak load) and peak user load conditions
2. Stress Testing: This testing helps to identify the breaking point of the system when it is subjected to a user load beyond the expected peak. The breaking point can be defined as a load at which either the response time degrades beyond 10% or transactions start falling by more than 5%.
3. Endurance Testing: It checks the stability and responsiveness of the system when it is under significant load (around 70% of peak load) for a longer period (usually 8 hours to 72 hours).
4. Spike Testing: It is a subset of stress testing and checks the behavior of the system by suddenly varying the no. of users. It checks if the system can handle the increased user load or not.
5. Volume Testing: In this testing, multiple data-intensive transactions are performed to validate how the system performs under such data volumes
6. Scalability Testing: This testing is done to identify the actual number of the users that the system can support with current hardware capacity

What are the benefits of performance testing?

• Improves response time: Response time is the total time taken by the software to generate an output against the input received. Usually, the response time should be less and therefore this testing is important as it helps in improving the response time taken by software.
• Enhances loading time: Slow-loading websites tend to annoy the customer and they lose interest. Therefore it is very important to check the loading time of your applications. This testing helps to improve the loading time of applications or websites.
• Ensures scalability: The software product is considered to be poor if it is not able to handle user load properly. Websites should be able to accommodate a wide range of users. Therefore load testing is done to improve the scalability of the website. 
• Eliminates bottlenecks: Bottlenecks are the barriers that decrease the responsiveness of the entire system. Bottlenecks could occur due to coding errors or other problems which results in decreased throughput rate. This test helps in finding bottlenecks by identifying the areas which are causing the problem and helps in fixing those problems.
• Increases customer satisfaction: It helps to eliminate bottlenecks and makes the software or product more reliable which in turn increases customer satisfaction

Conclusion: Everyday huge number of websites and apps are released in the market, but not all apps and websites can attract user’s attention. Many times we see cases where the app suddenly stops working, or freezes, website time-out, images are loaded correctly on the website, etc. This kind of issue annoys customers and can result in customer and revenue loss to the business. To ensure robust and high-performing software, businesses should leverage performance testing from a next-gen QA and software testing services provider.

About the author: I am a technical content writer and I write articles on various IT-related topics. In this article, I have tried to share my views on the need for performance testing in software testing.