Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.
Organizations riding the digital wave depend on multi-dimensional software solutions to achieve their business objectives. The examples of e-commerce, CRM, and ERP solutions are a testimony to the high-performing and quality assured software solutions. As such software solutions have become the digital hubs for enterprises to remain operational, reach out to customers, and execute a host of activities, they are required to be scalable and high performing at the same time.
In other words, when these software solutions are subjected to high user traffic, they should be able to deliver the expected outcomes without facing issues like latency, glitches, or downtime. This is a critical requirement for organizations as the modern customers trust applications that are fast, usable, safe, and high-performing, especially during high-traffic situations. The software solutions should be able to handle any surge in data, traffic, and transactions. And to achieve the same, performance testing of the software solutions should be conducted in the SDLC.
What is Application Performance Testing and Why Is It Needed?
It is a non-functional testing process wherein the stability, response, interoperability, speed, reliability, and scalability of a software solution are validated when it is subjected to increased workload.
For example, a software system may perform well for 1000 concurrent users at a given time. However, what happens when the same system receives over 10,000 concurrent users? Will it function at the same speed and deliver the expected outcomes? These are some of the questions that can only be answered when performance testing is made an integral part of the SDLC. And to understand if the software application can achieve scalability, various attributes of the same are tested such as:
■ Usage of memory or network
■ System throughput
■ Impact on the database due to increased load
■ Load time of the webpage or website
■ Request and response time
■ Measurement of performance
■ Screen transition
■ Transactions per second
■ Performance under load
How to Follow a Performance Testing Methodology to Achieve Scalability
Achieving scalability for a software application is important to deliver superior customer experiences, garner customer trust, and be profitable and competitive. The steps involved in doing so are:
■ Build and monitor every scenario
■ Change the scenarios and check the affected outcomes
■ Recheck the scenarios to check if they deliver similar outcomes
■ Define the virtual users who would test the system
■ Specify settings to evaluate the performance of the application
■ Create and run the load test
■ If any latency is found, make server changes and repeat the test
However, the QA team should prepare a detailed test plan before writing test cases to ensure the test is in accordance with the application’s requirement. The attributes to conduct application performance testing are:
■ A proper script detailing the steps or action each user needs to perform
■ Determine the run-time data that interacts with the software application
■ For varying run-time data, select the fields for such data
Result Analysis of Load Performance Testing
To test whether the performance testing framework is capable of checking the scalability of the application, the following results need to be compared and analyzed:
Virtual users versus response time: Here, testers set a specific time interval and go on increasing the number of users for a server while testing the application’s behavior. In other words, the application’s response time is tested for specified users.
Users versus latency: This analysis checks the latency of the system or network when used by a specified number of users.
Transactions per second versus users: Hits or transactions per second are observed after a time lag (say 3 minutes) of response by the users.
Users versus errors: The errors or bugs generated by the system when subjected to higher traffic are tracked.
Challenges in Checking the Scalability of the Software Application
Conducting performance testing to check the scalability of the application may involve a few challenges:
■ Functional errors are not always identified
■ Realistic scenarios are not always present during testing due to budget constraints
■ Proper analysis of the test results requires the testers to possess good knowledge of the system
■ Difficult to estimate the load to be applied to the system, application, or network
Conclusion
Delivering a quality product to the customers entails testing its performance and scalability. QA specialists may use a large number of tools available in the market to ensure the application performs to its optimum and delivers favorable outcomes for all types of load conditions — low, medium, or heavy.
Industry News
Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.
Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.
Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.
DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.
Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.
Buildkite announced the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Packagecloud, a cloud-based software package management platform, in an all stock deal.
CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire Bionic, a provider of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).
Perforce Software announces BlazeMeter's Test Data Pro, the latest addition to its continuous testing platform.
CloudBees announced a new cloud native DevSecOps platform that places platform engineers and developer experience front and center.
Akuity announced a new open source tool, Kargo, to implement change promotions across many application life cycle stages using GitOps principles.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced that it has been recognized on Newsweek’s inaugural list of the World’s Most Trustworthy Companies 2023.
CloudBees announced significant performance and scalability breakthroughs for Jenkins® with new updates to its CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) software.