Importance of Load Testing and Some Crucial Strategies to Follow
In order to ensure that a software or application is performing at its optimum, every quality assurance specialist needs to run it through a series of tests. Among these tests, the procedure of performance and load testing is often overlooked by many software testing professionals, thinking that achieving success when conducting a functional test is enough for software to work well. However, that is a wrong notion, and load testing has its very own benefits and importance.
Importance of Load testing:
Listed here, are some of the crucial points, which make load testing a necessary procedure.
- Simulation of actual user scenarios
- Testing for best performance irrespective of high and low traffic situations
- To determine changes caused due to changes in codes, while addressing bugs
- To make automation, Agile and continuous integration work best
- To prevent websites/applications from being slow or from crashing due to the unusual load
- To save money and manage significant events with an enormous audience
Some Must-do Load Testing Strategies:
Almost every load testing tool would allow you to set the number of virtual users you would like to simulate on. However, there are some best practices, which can assist you in creating realistic and robust load tests:
- 1. Aligning Virtual Users
During the process of performance and load testing, starting all the virtual users at the same time is not a desirable task. If all the virtual users are started at the same time, it can cause issues like artificial bottlenecks at certain portions of the application. One typical example of such an issue would be glitches in the login process. Most tools used for load testing would allow you to specify a load profile, whereby, you can initiate the process with a smaller number and slowly increase it with time. They would also have features that would allow you to conduct real-time debugging and would also provide instant results through the test process.
- Specifying the Load Duration
If you wish to conduct load testing with a vast number of virtual users, you must set the duration for the test. If a duration is set, every virtual user will first execute the scenario, and after reaching the endpoint, it will start all over again. Following this process, it will be easy to maintain load levels.
- Setting up Load Expectations
It is a good practice to set specific parameters while conducting the recording of the scenario. These parameters can be used for future test runs. However, playing back a test using the same data recorded for each user is not advisable, as this would not simulate the real-life conditions. To address this issue, parameterizing load tests with a specific variable is advisable, to assist in storing desired data which can be later used during test runs.
- Testing in Real Browsers
Real users may make use of a varied number of browsers when visiting a website. Moreover, the different internet connections used, have different bandwidths, and each user has its own specific time spent on a specific page. It would be an excellent strategy to run your load tests in actual browsers, to gauge your product’s performance correctly. Some state-of-the-art software testing tools allow testing by leveraging virtual users in real browsers. This gives way better insight into the product performance across various devices. Even the time that is taken by the user to view and think when on the page, can be specified. This time can be randomized for simulations, to be able to emulate real-user activities better while conducting performance tests.
- Simulation of Simultaneous Requests
In order to download any web page, web browsers of recent times, forward requests to servers, that make use of simultaneous connections. Images, CSS files, scripts, and other resources that are present on the page are thus, downloaded by these parallel requests. If you run your load tests in a real browser, you would not need to simulate these parallel requests. Your load testing tool would be capable of automatically detecting and running these concurrent requests.
Listed above are some underlying conditions that would assist in your load testing procedure and make it a realistic practice, giving you an actual overview of actual scenarios that can be faced with.
Qualitest Group is the world’s largest software testing and quality assurance company. QualiTest offers quality assurance and software testing services, and is committed to the highest standards of quality in every project. We aim to improve software quality by providing superior QA solutions to customers and partners worldwide, as well as advancing international QA and testing methodologies.
