Software testing plays a major role along with software development in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This testing process involves the testing of the software developed to ensure it is as per the requirements defined and error free for end users. Software testing can be categorized into two major types as Functional testing and Non-functional testing types.

Content 1. What is Performance Testing 2. Why is Performance Testing Essential for Testing Business Websites and Mobile Apps? 2.1 Performance Testing Process in Software Testing 3. What are the Challenges of Performance Testing and How to Overcome Them? 3.1 Selection of wrong performance testing tools 3.2 Lack of proper test strategy & test coverage 3.3 Time and budget constraints 3.4 Lack of knowledge about need for performance tests 3.5 Improper analysis of performance test outcomes 3.6 Difficulty in conducting tests on production environment 4. Conclusion

Some of the common types of functional testing are Unit, Integration, System, Sanity, Smoke, Interface, Regression, Acceptance testing, etc. Some of the most common Non-functional testing types are Reliability, Endurance, Localization, Recovery and Performance testing to name a few.

Out of these testing types, Performance testing is one of the important testing process that plays a critical role by ensuring the software performs stably and seamlessly even under varying load conditions.

What is Performance Testing?

Performance or load testing is an important non-functional type of testing and involves the process by which software or an application is tested to know its current system performance.

This sort of testing checks how your current system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability when tested under varying workload conditions. Significantly, the system is tested under multiple and different load and network conditions and this testing process effectively checks the time taken by the system to respond under these different loads.

Performance testing also ensures that the application performs as expected irrespective of the network fluctuations, bandwidth availability, or the load of traffic. Basically, this testing process determines the speed with which the system works and some of the issues identified with this type of testing are runtime bloat, optimization issues related to speed, latency, throughput, poor response times, load balancing problems, and other bandwidth issues if any.

There are various types of performance testing that are commonly adopted which include Endurance testing, Load testing, Volume testing, Stress testing, Scalability testing, Spike testing, etc. and these testing methods determines the speed, and responsiveness of the website, the app or the network when tested under different workloads.

Why is Performance Testing Essential for Testing Business Websites and Mobile Apps?

Performance testing measures the speed, scalability, reliability, and stability of the software under varying loads thus ensuring their stable performance. Every business application has to be stable and deliver consistent results, irrespective of the number of users accessing it at any point of time. Especially, with respect to banking apps, eCommerce apps, etc. these apps need to perform seamlessly even with numerous users, else it adversely affects the brand reputation.

Today’s users prefer apps that load spontaneously and get enticed with these apps that perform seamlessly and deliver great user experience. If the apps deliver slow response while accessing them, users tend to leave such apps and look out for alternatives.

Evidently, today it is essential for businesses to ensure the performance of their business apps and websites is seamless in order to deliver great customer experience. Performance tests such as load and stress tests determine the behaviour of the application, and help to check whether the server responds to the user with requested data within the stipulated time.

Hence, it is essential for business websites and mobile apps to work effectively even under heavy load of users, as it is important for them to keep going to ensure business continuity. Therefore, Performance testing is critical for business success and should be leveraged by enterprises.

Performance Testing Process in Software Testing

Now, let us try to list different activities of the Performance testing to get an understanding of the actual Performance testing process listed below:

– Analyze the existing environment

– Gather performance characteristics of the current system

– Define usage model and load distribution

– Define the performance acceptance criteria

– Develop the test assets, test plan, test scripts and scenarios

– Configure the load generation environment

– Execute planned tests

– Monitor web servers, application servers and database server’s performance counters

– Correlate and analyze the results

– Generate reports

– Provide performance improvement recommendations

– Retest as needed

Specifically, it is the QA team that is involved in the process of performance testing. The team needs to follow all the steps in order to perform this testing process to deliver effective results.

But, typically, while performing this method of performance testing or load testing, there are certain challenges which should be handled by the teams to ensure the success of the performance testing process.

What are the Challenges of Performance Testing and How to Overcome Them?

1. Selection of wrong performance testing tools:

This is a common challenge and in many situations the most appropriate performance testing tool is not selected. This tool selection depends on a number of factors such as application communication protocol, application technology stack, skill-level of the performance tester and the licencing cost of the tool.

If a wrong tool is chosen, then it might lead to loss of testing days for getting the test scripts to work and it is necessary that the chosen performance tool should recognize the controls of the application under test.

Solution:

It is necessary for the QA manager and the QA team to properly evaluate the application under test (AUT) along with licencing cost involved, and then choose the best performance testing tool to ensure success of the testing process.

2. Lack of proper test strategy & test coverage:

There is a lot of effort involved in designing a comprehensive testing strategy which takes care of identifying and prioritizing project risks and deciding on what actions to be taken to mitigate them.

This testing process involves identifying application performance characteristics, planning appropriate tests to exercise those characteristics, simulating real user interactions, testing of API services and testing whether all these services are working or not as part of the test strategy. Due to the lack of proper brainstorming while creation of test strategy and test coverage, it becomes difficult to get effective performance test results.

Solution:

The performance team should spend significant effort on analysing and understanding application architecture and other performance characteristics like load distribution, usage model, geography of usage, availability requirements, resilience requirements, reliability requirements, technology stack etc.

A proper and clear testing strategy should be developed to ensure validation of these performance characteristics to get effective performance test results.

3. Time and budget constraints:

Load testing essentially takes some time and budget to get effective results. Due to the lack of proper planning during software development, allocation of resources or budget is not done. This leads to dependence on low-skilled resources, who do not understand full scope of performance testing activities.

It also might lead to usage of open source tools which might lead to increased project risk. All these factors impact the quality of overall performance testing process.

Solution:

Therefore, at the beginning of projects, it is essential for businesses to plan for proper performance testing activities accounting for required timeframe, resources and proper budget allocations.

4. Lack of knowledge about need for performance tests:

Most stakeholders and budget makers do not recognize the value of performance testing during software development. In most instances, post production release of software, many performance issues may crop up which might result in crashing of the website, app or software.

Solution:

Evidently, it is essential for the stakeholders, product owners or test architect to plan for performance testing as part of end-to-end testing strategy. These applications should be performance tested exercising web servers, databases and third party apps to ensure effective performance.

5. Improper analysis of performance test outcomes:

This is indeed a significant challenge faced by many testers as a good amount of system and application knowledge is essential to deeply analyze the performance test results.

Solution:

An experienced performance tester should perform the testing process who will be able to judge the scenarios and could continuously refine the tests and keep adding tests to make them consistent. The performance tester should be well aware of application architecture.

Also, the performance tester should have experience across OS concepts, web architecture, OSI model, networking concepts, data structures, client-side performance concepts and server-side performance concepts. These performance experts will be able to quickly analyze the test results.

6. Difficulty in conducting tests on production environment:

Conducting load tests on a fully functioning production environment is a challenge. Especially while testing in such situations, real-time users are using the product and any change to the production environment might affect the user experience.

Solution:

It is essential to closely monitor the trends in the production environment in order to spot out irregularities. The performance testing activities should ideally be planned in production like environment instead of actual production environment.

If business needs demand execution in actual production environment, such activities should be executed only during off business hours with sufficient time in hand for any corrective actions in case application crashes under load in production.

Earlier, load testing was mostly taken up to simulate basic user actions at a protocol level. But, today with more complex applications in place with intricate user actions, load testers might need to balance between automation and exploratory testing to handle these new technology complex applications.

Conclusion:

Performance testing is a non-functional type of testing that is performed to ascertain how the system performs under varying load conditions. The speed, scalability, reliability and resource usage of the software or the application is evaluated with this type of testing. It is essential for business websites especially eCommerce sites and mobile apps to get performance tested to ensure they scale up when numerous users access simultaneously.

There are many types of performance testing methods that can be adopted to test the software. But, typically while performing this testing method, the QA teams tend to encounter certain challenges. Specifically, the QA teams need to follow certain measures to overcome these above listed challenges to deliver stable and quality software.

Last but not the least, it is essential for businesses to leverage performance testing services provider to be assured of scalable, stable and high-performing software.

Talk to our experts today to discuss your unique QA challenges and see how we bring value to your business

The post Major Performance Testing Challenges and How to Overcome Them first appeared on TestingXperts.

Today’s fast-paced technology-centric world presents opportunities and threats at every turn. It has become challenging to practice agile development no matter how big or small an organization you are. To become sustainable in this disruptive environment, agility is key.

Here are the 6 keys to build business agility.

The post 6 Keys to Build Business Agility- Infographic first appeared on TestingXperts.

Application failures on Black Friday can cause a negative impact on the revenue and reputation of the company. There are many renowned e-commerce companies that have faced this distress and have had a major setback during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale.

Contents 1. Black Friday and Performance Testing 2. Best Performance Management strategies for E-commerce Companies 3. Open Source Load Testing Tools 4. Conclusion

Black Friday and Performance Testing

Taking into consideration the previous years’ statistics, performance testing has to be more robust for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Though it is extremely challenging to survive through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an extensive performance testing strategy can make it easier to achieve our goals successfully.

Let us discuss the best performance management strategies that can make it easier for e-commerce companies to survive through the big days.

Best Performance Management strategies for E-commerce Companies

An Increase in the website capacity

Analytics should be used to compare the current and planned system peak loads. In order to be sure and confident, it’s important to contact the web hosting provider and confirm all the traffic limitations and upgrade the server if possible.

Auto-scaling is able to handle the unexpected traffic spikes as this technique is used in cloud computing. Waiting until the influx of traffic causes hustle and crashes your website can make it worse. It is better to be ready for the worst beforehand. With the auto scaling technique, number of virtual machines can be increased and then decreased after the requirement has been met.

Improve client-side performance and optimize speed

According to industry reports, the average time for a website to load is 3.9 seconds. Visitors get annoyed and leave the website if they have to wait for too long to see the discount offers. Therefore, it is important to optimize the website speed. This can be done by compressing the size of the CSS, compressing image size, and shortening the JavaScript.

Open Source Load Testing Tools

Fortunately, there are various open source load testing tools that you can use to accelerate load time quickly:

WEBPAGETEST

This tool allows the testers to run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the world. Real browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, etc. can be used at real consumer connection speeds. This tool runs simple as well as complicated tests including video capturing, content blocking, multi-step transactions, and much more. This tool provides a complete diagnostic information including waterfall charts, resource loading, and page speed optimization.

COMPRESSOR.IO

Compressor.io is one of the most powerful online tools for compressing the size of the images whilst maintaining a high quality. What really impresses people, is the quality that remains the same before and after compression. After compression, the page starts to load quickly.

PAGESPEED and YSLOW

PageSpeed and YSlow are important as they help in identifying what exactly is slowing down the website and what can be done about it. The information presented in these tools are very clear and easy to understand for developers as well as non-developers. For every issue, there is a detailed explanation given which tells why it is important to make improvements and how would it benefit the website.

SITESPEED.IO

This tool allows to run the tests locally or as a service on the web. This tool is not just based on the URL that is provided as it has a crawler that identifies and analyzes all the pages that one might reach.

Conclusion

As we talk about the tools that can help in increasing the performance of your application during the big days, you might realize that very few days are left for Black Friday. Now, all you can do is rely on a renowned software testing company that has extensive experience in performance testing, and that can provide you with the best services in no time. At TestingXperts, we have expertise in pioneering performance engineering for leading e-commerce sites globally.

Do you have an e-commerce website / application? We can help you implement thorough performance testing to ensure you don’t lose business because of a poor web or application experience. Connect with us today!

The post How to Improve your Application’s Performance on Black Friday first appeared on TestingXperts.

The world is getting more and more connected with each passing day. It is believed that around 30 billion independent things will be connected to the internet by 2020. Now, with this pressure to move at a greater speed, the biggest stumbling block is to identify how to build a continuous approach to testing across multiple channels of engagement.

Contents 1. API Testing 2. What are the benefits of API testing? 3. Challenges of API Testing 4. How to Overcome API Testing Challenges 5. What type of bugs are identified with API testing? 6. What are the tools for API testing? 7. Conclusion

API Testing

The consumerization of IT is changing how applications are being developed. Rather than building a single, monolithic system installed on a server in a back office, modern applications are distributed within mobile devices and web browsers so users can gain access to services from anywhere and at any time. Modern applications are no longer autonomous; they comprise several service components tied together at runtime.

As a result, the end-user experience is not driven by the well-designed user interfaces we all use, but by application programming interfaces (APIs) that expedite interactions between applications, code modules, and back-end systems.

What are the benefits of API testing?

1. Completely Language-Independent:In API testing, there are several data transfer modes, the data can be exchanged using JSON or XML. Since these languages are used for development and are technology-independent, the teams can select any core language while performing the API tests.

2. Helps for Integrated User Experience: With API, embedding the content from any application or website is easier. This way of ease in delivering information is an important benefit as it helps to maintain an integrated user experience.

3. Protects from vulnerabilities and code breakage: API testing effectively helps to eliminate the vulnerabilities with its excellent conditions and inputs. These help in protecting the application from vulnerabilities caused due to the insertion of unknown code or due to code breakage. 

4. Reduces testing time: The methodologies of API testing are excellent to minimize the time consumption. Unlike validation and functional testing, API testing is faster in performing more number of tests. 

5. Increases Developers Productivity: For writing any code, there are very few instances where the developers start from a scratch. While designing API, there is a code base provided to help the time consumption of developers in writing code. This existing code base helps in limiting the differentiation in the code among the developers and also eliminates the time needed for creating new code.

6. Faster results at less cost: In API testing, there is no need for using large codes. By using the lesser code which is less than the GUI automated tests, these tests help to provide easier and faster test results with better test coverage. This results in achieving faster results at reduced testing costs. Also, the faster detection of errors helps in reducing the cost involved for manual testing. 

The API is the intelligence behind this connected world. APIs allow companies to become more agile, and to work together in an integrated manner. However, while testing APIs, testers face several units of work, making it challenging for the testers to test the APIs. Below are the four major challenges experienced while testing APIs along with and suggested solutions.

Challenges of API Testing

1) Use case propagation

Traditional UI testing is limited to the testing functionality of the overall application. A tester construes the output against expected outcomes after exercising an input. However, API testing follows a different approach. Being the central hub of logic and the gateway to data for interfacing applications, use cases are near-infinite in API testing. Consequently, the number of required tests rapidly exceeds the competences of the technical staff responsible for test case design.

2) Access to connected systems

APIs pull data from multiple APIs and back-end systems, in which the resulting architecture looks like the roots of a tree extending wide and deep. Thus, it’s impossible to have access to every environment on this tree. The emulation of inaccessible resources is the key to avoiding testing bottlenecks. However, the old way of building custom mocks is proving too challenging. Besides, they cannot emulate race conditions for comprehensive performance and load testing.

3) Synchronous and asynchronous methods

Modern applications are intricate, and one API can link several microservices and other APIs. Accordingly, a single call on an API can prompt ‘n’ number of serial and parallel activities. The intricacies of an API can thus grow exponentially as it is combined with other API calls. And this complexity multiplies as testers feature in the calling order of APIs in test case design. Consequently, testing APIs must be managed in both separate and nuclear units of work.

4) API versioning

Versioning is a primary cause of rising complexity in API testing. Most systems have a degree of depreciation, which should be managed by an API with the help of versioning. The API must identify missing values and allocate some default to allow the old version to work. Moreover, it can be the case that some versions are called by some versions but not others.

How to Overcome API Testing Challenges

To overcome the above-listed challenges, a modern approach should be adopted that enables you to automate API tests and integrate them into a continuous delivery cycle.

Phase I: Integration level Testing

The integration test phase will focus on service interfaces and will make sure interface behavior and information sharing are working as specified.

Phase II: Process/Orchestration Testing

This phase covers:

• Business logic
• Sequencing
• Exception handling
• Process decomposition (including service and process reuse)

Phase III: Security and Governance Testing

In this phase, SOA / API is combined with Government and Regulatory compliance, which is incorporated into the entire project life cycle. This phase comprises Quality of Service policies on Performance, Security, and Transactions.

• Regulatory policies
• Business policies
• Audit policies
• Infrastructure policies

Phase IV: System Level Testing

This test phase will cover whether the technical solution met the defined business acceptance criteria.

What type of bugs are identified with API testing?

Identifies bugs related to Authentication: With API testing, it is easier to trigger the bugs raised because of entering unacceptable characters in the apps authentication field. Though the bugs are not considered as severe for the application, it can sometimes lead to app destruction. 

Resolves the issue of Browser Adaptability: For any application, browser adaptability is one of the important needs. If the application fails to respond to any browser, then it can lead to dissatisfaction among the users and affect the brand reputation. Hence, by adopting the methods of API testing, it becomes simpler to identify and resolve the issues related to the app’s ability across browsers.

Identifies configuration errors on all devices: It is necessary for the apps to be compatible across the devices. If the app is unable to meet any device resolution, then this can raise complications for the app’s future and user’s interest. With API testing, it becomes easier to find out whether the app is compatible across devices and browsers to target the audience. 

Finds the bugs related to accessibility: Users always prefer apps that are user-friendly and provide a simplified understanding of the app usage. Hence, it is essential to know the importance of adding the menu, help, and search sections on the homepage. An easily accessible app is always a top choice for users.

What are the tools for API testing?

Open-Source API Testing Tools:

• JMeter
• Rest-Assured
• Karate DSL
• Citrus Framework
• Parasoft SOAtest
• Rest Assured  
• Tricentis

Commercial API Testing Tools:

• Katalon Studio
• SoapUI
• Postman
• Apigee

Conclusion

TestingXperts is proficient in a wide range of API protocols such as XML, SOAP, JSON, REST, Gdata, YAML, ATOM, RSS, and RDF, etc. Our end to end applications validation experience at various layers of the application helps in executing a successful API. Our expertise in leading industry tools for API testing for functional, load and security testing allows us to automate API test cases.

The post Top 4 Challenges of API Testing and How to Overcome Them first appeared on TestingXperts.

Summer seems to be ending very quickly and the holidays are fast approaching. Is your website/application up and running as planned? Even if it is, it needs to be additionally prepped for the fall and winter holiday shopping season. Sometimes, the application is not able to withstand the sudden influx of users and before you know it, either the website servers are down, or the payment gateway crashes. This negligence can end up having an adverse impact on the brand. Executing a great amount of testing can help you cover different conditions under a uniform environment.

Contents 1. E-commerce Testing Techniques 2. Perfecting the Performance 3. Giving Prominence to Usability Testing 4. Getting the Spotlight on Security 5. Conclusion

Let us talk about 3 most effective testing techniques that help your e-commerce company to deal with adverse situations on those big days.

2. Giving Prominence to Usability Testing:

Considering that e-commerce websites hold plenty of dynamic content, usability testing helps testers detect issues faced by potential users. The testing is performed under given scenarios that represent realistic conditions. A/B testing or split testing comes under this category and is possibly the most effective method to provide a choice of desired user experience to your customers.

3. Getting the Spotlight on Security:

Security is not an option. In fact, it is an important aspect that can either make or break your e-commerce company. Ensuring that your website is secure is possibly the most important advice here. While other issues can be ignored, overlooked, or elapsed time but security issues can have a huge impact on your business. The amount of sensitive information, an e-commerce application has increased the risk of it getting hacked. To deal with such instances, prior security measures should be taken in the form of extensive security testing.

Conclusion

Since your website/application is the gateway to your business, you should embrace the right testing strategy that helps you deliver the right buying experience to your customers and helps you gain more and more customers. Once you are ready with planning an effective testing strategy, all you need to do is to assign the right time and resources.

TestingXperts is the leading provider of e-commerce testing solutions globally. We cater to customers across various industry domains, through effective testing solutions. We have successfully performed usability testing for our numerous clients. Get in touch with us if you are looking to test usability aspects of your business applications.

The post Is your E-Commerce Application Ready for the upcoming Holiday Season? first appeared on TestingXperts.

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