Best Practices for Performance Testing: Ensuring Optimal User Experience

Performance and load times are crucial factors for consumer-oriented web applications. If a web app functions well under low user loads but performs sluggishly with high user volumes, it can leave a negative impression on users and drive them to try out your competitor's app or website.

In the current digital landscape, delivering an exceptional digital experience goes beyond just page load times and speed. This is where performance testing becomes vital as it enables comprehensive testing of the non-functional aspects of a website or web app, including stability, reliability, responsiveness, and performance under specific workloads. If you're new to performance testing, make sure to refer to our comprehensive guide to performance testing.

In this blog, we explore some of the best practices for performance testing, based on our extensive experience serving global clients and fulfilling their performance testing needs.

The Significance of Timing in Performance Testing

Timing is a critical aspect of performance testing that should not be overlooked. When planning a performance testing strategy, it's essential to consider the "think time" involved in the process, especially for applications that require users to pause and enter details such as credit card information.

For instance, when testing an online shopping website or application, it's crucial to simulate real-world scenarios where users need time to complete tasks such as entering payment details. This way, the performance testing scenario will align with the activities carried out by end-users.

When conducting performance testing, it's advisable to partner with a reliable performance testing service provider like WeTest PerfDog. PerfDog is a comprehensive performance test and analysis tool that allows you to quickly identify performance issues in your application or game.

With the quick and easy plug-and-play system, you can quickly locate performance issues without ROOT/Jailbreak, and our solution supports all types of applications, including games, apps, browsers, mini-programs, mini-games, H5, and background system processes.

Learning from Previous Performance Testing Experiments

Like any other form of testing, performance testing presents an opportunity to learn from earlier strategies executed in previous projects. The ability to learn from past performance testing experiments is key to building a robust and effective strategy.

It's important to maintain detailed notes on all executed experiments from a performance testing perspective. Careful documentation facilitates the identification of areas of improvement and optimization opportunities in performance testing scenarios. Additionally, keeping track of previous experiments ensures that repetitive testing efforts are avoided, thereby saving time and resources.

Developing a Comprehensive Performance Testing Strategy

Developing an effective performance testing strategy requires careful planning and execution. It's essential to dedicate ample time to plan and execute the testing strategy considering the project type and functionalities built into the product.

While performance testing is a form of non-functional testing, it's crucial to have an in-depth understanding of how essential elements interact in the software stack. Understanding the relationships between the various components enables organizations to identify potential bottlenecks that impact application performance.

Moreover, it's important to consider the users' expectations from a performance point of view when developing a performance testing strategy. This includes identifying user personas, evaluating their usage behavior, and setting appropriate performance benchmarks.

Locating Performance Blockers in Modules

Identifying performance issues before users experience them is crucial, and it's useful to locate performance blockers in the project or module before they become a problem. Whether you are an experienced or a newbie tester, it's recommended to consider things at a micro level rather than a macro level.

For this reason, approaching performance testing from a module perspective is more effective than testing at the product level. Though this approach might seem time-consuming, it offers significant benefits in the long run as performance issues identified at the module level do not impact the final product.

In addition, breaking down the testing process into smaller, manageable modules allows for more focused testing efforts that are better suited to identify potential performance blockers. This also enables testers to pinpoint performance issues to specific modules, making it easier to resolve them quickly.

Moreover, testing at the module level reduces the possibility of overlooking performance issues due to interdependencies between different parts of the application. This allows for more precise identification of performance bottlenecks specific to each module, leading to more accurate performance improvement recommendations.

Performing Automated Performance Testing

Automated performance testing is a valuable tool that many organizations use to improve their product development and testing processes. With Agile methodologies and CI/CD tools becoming commonplace, automated performance testing can be run at various components of the technology stack, enabling organizations to identify performance issues at different levels.