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Guide to Shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering

Navdeep Singh Gill | 30 August 2024

 Shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering

Introduction to Performance Engineering and Testing

As the world becomes more digital, so does digital gadgets. Users expected that every application would be flawless Speed, easy usage, perfect data security, and visual appeal, the basic expectation of every user. Your app risks being deleted by Flounder if any of them. Because of a sudden spike in digital gadgets, Naturally, testing has become more relevant. With short deadlines and updates being rolled out continuously to ensure exceptional user experience, developers and QAs often find themselves racing against time. It's easy to overlook irregularities that could damage an app's speed, stability, or responsiveness under such situations.

Performance testing is to determine and identify any performance-related issues or bottlenecks in the application under test. Click to explore about, Performance Testing Tools

They are making sure overall performance, and functional excellence in such short timelines can appear tough. However, more testers are shifting to a newer improvement strategy to deal with this. They're shifting from acting trying out to overall performance Engineering.

What is Performance Testing?

Performance testing is non-functional testing that examines how well a system responds to a given workload in terms of responsiveness, stability, speed, and scalability. It ensures the quality of software. Performance testing occurs after the code is ready for release and is part of the SDLC process.

What is Performance Engineering?

Performance engineering is a systematic approach to continuous and end-to-end application performance testing and monitoring. Performance engineering allows collaboration with the team and process based on the business requirements and gives continuous feedback loops.

Performance engineering reduces the last-minute bug’s report and needs to rework and refactor application tuned that provide better business values.

A tool that enables end users, administrators and organizations to gauge and evaluate the performance of a given system. Click to explore about, Performance Monitoring

What is the need to shift to Performance Engineering?

Performance engineering allows collaboration with project stakeholders from BA to the developer. It is maintaining the high performance of the software that increases the user experience.

Performance engineering is based on business requirements. This aims to provide a better business value for organizations by discovering the issue at an early stage of the Software Development Life Cycle.

  • It will reduce the need to rework and refactor the application.
  • Performance engineering Reduce system and hardware costs.
  • Improve the performance of the legacy system.
  • Implementation of DevOps in SPE.
  • Enhance End-to-End application performance optimization.
  • Application early detection of product performance issues.
  • Ensure stable and reliant UX.
Continuous Monitoring produces information about an application’s performance and usage patterns. Click to explore about, Observability vs Monitoring

What are the best practices of Performance Engineering?

The best practices for performance engineering in four categories:

  • Project management
  • Performance modelling
  • Performance measurement
  • Techniques

These are some best practices that a software engineer should follow:

Refactor rather than tuning

Companies often get issues related to the performance of the software by tuning the system to derive the expected result. The tuning technique results are nothing compared to the well-tested performance engineer's results. The tuning project is not capable of using existing architecture. The tuning strategy could save companies time, but it is not beneficial for the long run.

Run each test multiple times

Running a test multiple times will ensure that the results you get are reliable.
Running the test case multiple times in the same environment will get back to you with the same results.

The credibility of the test is an essential factor when implementing performance engineering in the software. If a test produces the same result after multiple tries, you could be performing testing.

Produce Timely Results for Performance Studies

It's critical to formulate and convey results and recommendations on time, especially when remedial action is imminent. Key architectural or design decisions may have already been made if a large amount of time passes between when the information is required and supplied. If this occurs, the necessary changes may become more difficult or impossible to implement.

Monitor memory, CPU, disk, and network usage

We measure the performance of both the programme and the hardware we're testing on in performance engineering. Hardware like Memory, CPU and network usage play a key role in our testing. We also need to understand how processing resources are distributed.

The architecture of Performance Engineering

The software application architecture presents a software component and shows the relationship between them. It depicts the system’s organization or structure and explains how it behaves. It is the blueprint of an organization or company that represents the collection of components that accomplish a specific function or set of functions.

To identifies how all cores are being used either in case of going concurrent programming or going sequential way of programming. Click to explore about, Performance Tracing Tools

What are the challenges of Performance Engineering?

Despite numerous affordable resources on the market, an organization's capacity to remedy performance concerns by adding more resources is not sustainable. This strategy will stifle efficiency and exacerbate problems. To figure out how to repair it, you must first comprehend the most significant performance engineering difficulties.

Lack of Understanding The Process

Another significant issue is a lack of knowledge about how performance engineering might benefit your company. The majority of executives are unaware of the significance of performance engineering during the development phase. This misunderstanding causes a wide range of performance concerns, including crashing due to increased traffic.

Everything from web servers to third-party apps falls under performance engineering. It's an end-to-end testing approach that ensures more efficient performance testing while improving your customers' UX.

Selecting The Right Tools

One of the most difficult decisions is which testing tools to use. Testing has become an integral aspect of CI/CD, with more testing tools available to performance engineers. As the number of possibilities has expanded, performance engineers' job has become more challenging.

DevOps Optimization

Teams that successfully integrate performance engineering into their DevOps processes achieve better results. The cloud has changed the way we undertake performance testing. Testing in a cloud environment like AWS is more convenient. Debugging new lines of code is simple in cloud systems. They also make it simple to test new versions before deployment, lowering the chance of catastrophic failure in production.

Every component of your DevOps cycle should be in place by the time you need to run load tests. This synchronization allows you to eliminate any bottlenecks or complications that may develop.

The primary goal of performance tuning is to find bad parts /bottlenecks of code and to improve a bad parts/bottlenecks of codes. Click to explore about, Performance Tuning Working Architecture

How to shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering?

Here is some necessary groundwork that you have performed during the shift

Build the right team

Business and technology departments collaborate in performance engineering.
People who are comfortable talking about all aspects of the app, from development to market value, should be included. They should also be motivated to participate because The entire team sets the goals.

Incorporate Automation

Because a performance engineering strategy gives a bird's eye perspective of an app in development, automating testing as much as feasible is critical. The app must be
evaluated after each change to ensure that the change has been implemented.

Engineers can use automated app testing to create test cases for a large number of
functions while manually evaluating subsequent changes to ensure they don't break the app's general operation. Consider using cloud-based testing systems that enable you to perform automated tests remotely.

Start Early on

The transition to performance engineering must occur at the start of a new project. The end product is more likely to be faster, more stable, and more efficient if the team starts looking at performance as a whole early in the development process. Of course, the change might be made later in the process, particularly during the
redesign/reengineering phase, which tries to create a new product iteration.

Select the Correct Metrics

In terms of app performance and user experience, a performance engineering team
must have a core set of KPIs. Because of the team's cross-functional nature, each
member must understand the end goals thoroughly. This ensures that
everyone on the team knows where their efforts are going.

Automation may also be useful, especially if the team is large. Combine
automatic reporting from several teams on a single dashboard if practicable. Goals
will be easier to measure as a result of this. You can also establish standard baselines or the minimum that each person or team should achieve within the given timeframes.

Don't overlook indirect business measures that show consumer response, brand value, revenue, and market positioning.

Java vs Kotlin
Managed services for Enterprises to facilitate Automated Security Alerts, Single Click Deployments and Monitoring Solutions. Click to Talk to our Technology Specialists

Conclusion

As explained in this article, both performance testing and performance engineering help your website and application achieve industry standards. The SDLC includes
performance engineering to ensure that the system is built to high standards and optimised for performance. Performance testing is often done after a website or
application has been established or in a production environment. LoadView may be used by both performance test engineers and performance engineers to ensure that your website or application is built for high performance and tested before going website live.