Software application Performance Testing is a somewhat subjective phrase that many people find difficult to define. For instance, what exactly is good performance? How to determine if something is fast, and what makes an application slow? The difficulty is that these are subjective terms that vary among users, applications, and devices.

If your goal is to create a fast web application, or you’re dealing with users complaining that the mobile app is slow, testing for this may prove challenging. The fact is that actual Performance Testing will help to determine if a system meets specific acceptance criteria for both responsiveness and robustness under reasonable load. Although responsiveness varies—it could be the amount of latency between server request/response cycles or the reaction time to user input. It’s typically something that can be measured directly. Robustness also varies by system, but it usually translates into a measurement of scalability, stability, and overall system reliability.

Instead of dealing with the subjective, an excellent approach to Performance Testing includes precise plans and well-thought-out goals. Start by defining test plans that include stress testing, load testing, availability testing, endurance testing, isolation testing, and configuration testing. Merge these plans with precise metrics regarding goals, thresholds, acceptable measurements, and plan to deal with the performance issues for the best results. Including measures such as average response time over predefined time frames, perfect timings, graphs of standard deviation, average latency.

Performance Testing is non-functional testing. It is performed to determine how a system performs regarding responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It can serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as reliability, scalability and resource usage. Learn more about Performance Monitoring in this insight.

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