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.
|
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