Performance Testing 

Performance testing and types of performance testing such as Load Testing, Volume Testing, Stress Testing, Capacity Testing, Soak/Endurance Testing and Spike Testing come under Non-functional Testing.

 

Software Performance testing is type of testing perform to determine the performance of system to major the measure, validate or verify quality attributes of the system like responsiveness, Speed, Scalability, Stability under variety of load conditions. The system is tested under a mixture of load conditions and check the time required responding by the system under varying workloads. Software performance testing involves the testing of application under test to ensure that application is working as expected under variety of load conditions. The goal of performance testing is not only find the bugs in the system but also eliminate the performance bottlenecks from the system.

 

 

Load Testing:

 

Load Testing is to verify that the system/application can handle the expected number of transactions and to verify the system/application behavior under both normal and peak load conditions (no. of users).

 

Load Testing is type of performance testing to check system with constantly increasing the load on the system until the time load is reaches to its threshold value. Here Increasing load means increasing number of concurrent users, transactions & check the behavior of application under test. It is normally carried out underneath controlled environment in order to distinguish between two different systems. It is also called as “Endurance testing” and “Volume testing”. The main purpose of load testing is to monitor the response time and staying power of application when system is performing well under heavy load. Load testing comes under the Non Functional Testing & it is designed to test the non-functional requirements of a software application.

Load testing is perform to make sure that what amount of load can be withstand the application under test. The successfully executed load testing is only if the specified test cases are executed without any error in allocated time.

Simple examples of load testing:

• Testing printer by sending large job.
• Editing a very large document for testing of word processor
• Continuously reading and writing data into hard disk.
• Running multiple applications simultaneously on server.
• Testing of mail server by accessing thousands of mailboxes
• In case of zero-volume testing & system fed with zero load.

 

 

 

2) Stress Testing:

Stress Testing is performance testing type to check the stability of software when hardware resources are not sufficient like CPU, memory, disk space etc.

“To determine or validate an application’s behaviour when it is pushed beyond normal or peak load conditions.”

Stress testing is Negative testing where we load the software with large number of concurrent users/processes which cannot be handled by the systems hardware resources. This testing is also known as Fatigue testing, this testing should capture the stability of the application by testing it beyond its bandwidth capacity.

The main idea behind stress testing is to determine the failure of system and to keep an eye on how the system gracefully get recover back, this quality is known as recoverability. Stress testing comes under the Non Functional Testing & it is designed to test the non-functional requirements of a software application. This testing is to be carried out under controlled environment before launch, so that we can accurately capture the system behaviour under most erratic scenarios

 

 

Stress Testing is to verify the behaviour of the system once the load increases more than the system’s design expectations. This testing addresses which components fail first when we stress the system by applying the load beyond the design expectations. So that we can design more robust system.

 

 

3) Spike testing:

Spike testing is subset of Stress Testing. A spike test is carried out to validate the performance characteristics when the system under test subjected to workload models and load volumes that repeatedly increase beyond anticipated production operations for short periods of time.

Spike Testing is to determine the behaviour of the system under sudden increase of load (a large number of users) on the system.

4) Endurance testing:

Endurance testing is a non functional type of testing. Endurance testing involves testing a system with a expected amount of load over a long period of time to find the behaviour of system. Let’s take a example where system is designed to work for 3 hrs of time but same system endure for 6 hrs of time to check the staying power of system. Most commonly test cases are executed to check the behaviour of system like memory leaks or system fails or random behaviour. Sometimes endurance testing is also referred as Soak testing.

5) Scalability Testing:

Scalability Testing is type of non-functional tests and it is the testing of a software application for determine its capability to scale up in terms of any of its non-functional capability like the user load supported, the number of transactions, the data volume etc. The main aim if this testing is to understand at what peak the system prevent more scaling.

6) Volume testing:

Volume testing is non-functional testing which refers to testing a software application with a large amount of data to be processed to check the efficiency of the application. The main goal of this testing is to monitor the performance of application under varying database volumes.