Being a software test engineer isn’t just randomly analysing the bugs and loopholes in a system; it significantly requires an adequate strategy for enhanced user experience! When it comes to the overall performance of the application, one just can’t rely on the conventional manual testing methodologies alone. More room is given to the automated testing procedures that can augment the performance of the system for better reliability.
A majority of people assume performance testing and performance engineering as a single term. The reality isn’t the same! Performance engineering depicts the functionality of the system and the collaboration of all parts of the system. This system hardware, configuration, security, and software are observed for harmonious functionality.
On the other hand, performance testing is a procedure that enables a testing professional to monitor the functionality and load-bearing capacity of an application. Here is the list of aspects related to these terms that everyone ought to know.
The Importance of Performance Engineering
The performance of an application typically affects the business model of a company, which is perhaps the reason one should emphasize the same. A minor delay in loading could be the reason for the decreasing revenues as per the surveys. Managed performance and the overall user experience should be the biggest priority while planning the quality analysis of a system.
With the increased demand for highly efficient software and applications, it is necessarily important for a business to focus on developing enhanced systems that can deliver outstanding performance. There is no point one can rely on just conventional testing strategy without the involvement of automated scripts and planned modules.
The Tasks that need to be executed
The testing professionals need to implement certain tasks that can help in monitoring the overall performance of the system. Here is the list of the tasks that are executed by a testing team:
Configuring the Testing Environment
One of the initial things that the testing professional needs to emphasize is the testing environment. You always need to analyze the testing environment for the availability of adequate hardware, software, and network configurations so as to run the test cases. The testing environment varies with different testing requirements.
This means that the testing engineer first needs to examine the actual requirements of an application and then configure the environment for the same. There could be numerous challenges associated with the overall performance of the system, which is perhaps the reason that a testing professional must plan the configuration accordingly.
Analysing the Metrics
Analysing the success criteria for the application is necessarily important and one can easily get the desired results by first filling the testing needs. The testing engineer needs to precisely plan the standards on which the application needs to be tested.
A lot of testing professionals aren’t aware regarding the industrial standards that are pre-defined to ensure adequate delivery of performance. This is perhaps the reason you have to first analyze the market regarding the metric that defines the peak performance, breakage point, and response time.
Manual Analysis
Apart from the automated testing environment, some proportion of the testing phase still relies on manual approach. Development of efficient test cases, separation of data, and the analysis of automated report are some tasks that fall under manual approach.
It is the responsibility of the testing engineer to check the functionality of the application at least twice before recommending the application for automation testing.
Load Testing
The second step to analyse the true potential of an application is the load test. There is no point of deploying your application if it is not able to handle multiple users at a time. This is perhaps the reason one must prefer automated scripts that can test the performance of an application by running a command in a loop.
Moreover, these automated scripts can be utilized to check the breakage point of the application that further lends a hand in getting the idea about the future scope and alterations requirement in the application. It is strongly recommended by the experts that one should never ignore the importance of load testing, which is considered as the base of any of the web application.
Functional Testing
Another crucial aspect of performance engineering is the functional testing of an application. Functional testing could be defined as the deep analysis of the system’s functions and the problem-solving ability. This testing scenario predicts whether the functionality of the application is working precisely and serving the purpose or not.
In most of the cases, there are certain glitches with the overall functionality of the system, which is then reported to the development team. Once the detailed report is analyzed by the developers, the necessary changes are made so that the user experience isn’t compromised at any cost.
These are some aspects associated with both performance testing and performance engineering that you ought to know.
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