Monday, September 16, 2013

Performance Test Benefits




Performance Test Benefits

Term
Benefits
Challenges and Areas Not Addressed
Performance test
·         Determines the speed, scalability and stability characteristics of an application, thereby providing an input to making sound business decisions.
·         Focuses on determining if the user of the system will be satisfied with the performance characteristics of the application.
·         Identifies mismatches between performance-related expectations and reality.
·         Supports tuning, capacity planning, and optimization efforts.
·         May not detect some functional defects that only appear under load.
·         If not carefully designed and validated, may only be indicative of performance characteristics in a very small number of production scenarios.
·         Unless tests are conducted on the production hardware, from the same machines the users will be using, there will always be a degree of uncertainty in the results.
Load test
·         Determines the throughput required to support the anticipated peak production load.
·         Determines the adequacy of a hardware environment.
·         Evaluates the adequacy of a load balancer.
·         Detects concurrency issues.
·         Detects functionality errors under load.
·         Collects data for scalability and capacity-planning purposes.
·         Helps to determine how many users the application can handle before performance is compromised.
·         Helps to determine how much load the hardware can handle before resource utilization limits are exceeded.
·         Is not designed to primarily focus on speed of response.
·         Results should only be used for comparison with other related load tests.
Stress test
·         Determines if data can be corrupted by overstressing the system.
·         Provides an estimate of how far beyond the target load an application can go before causing failures and errors in addition to slowness.
·         Allows you to establish application-monitoring triggers to warn of impending failures.
·         Ensures that security vulnerabilities are not opened up by stressful conditions.
·         Determines the side effects of common hardware or supporting application failures.
·         Helps to determine what kinds of failures are most valuable to plan for.
·         Because stress tests are unrealistic by design, some stakeholders may dismiss test results.
·         It is often difficult to know how much stress is worth applying.
·         It is possible to cause application and/or network failures that may result in significant disruption if not isolated to the test environment.
Capacity test
·         Provides information about how workload can be handled to meet business requirements.
·         Provides actual data that capacity planners can use to validate or enhance their models and/or predictions.
·         Enables you to conduct various tests to compare capacity-planning models and/or predictions.
·         Determines the current usage and capacity of the existing system to aid in capacity planning.
·         Provides the usage and capacity trends of the existing system to aid in capacity planning
·         Capacity model validation tests are complex to create.
·         Not all aspects of a capacity-planning model can be validated through testing at a time when those aspects would provide the most value.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment