Performance Testing – Why Invest?

By Author: creswebs
Total Articles: 72
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Ideally in a real world Project or Testing Lifecycle, it is essential that Performance Testing is considered an Investment priority, this is valuable from a business and IT perspective. Preferably to ensure the Application, System or Environment under test is:
• Fit for purpose – Meets agreed business SLA’s/Performance level requirements.
• Responsive – Performance responsiveness is crucial under various user/load scenarios.
• Scalable – Meets current and future capacity requirements to scale up or scale out.
• Stable – Meets Performance level requirements under load.
• Confidence – Business and IT Stakeholders need to be confident the system will perform to expected requirements and SLA’s.
Further to the above, another critical success factor in ascertaining whether you should invest in performance testing is evaluating your Return on Investment (ROI). Some of the elements that can provide justification for this include:
• Application Tuning – Find and fix architectural defects and Performance Bottlenecks.
• Environment/Infrastructure Tuning – ...
... Improved efficiency of existing hardware.
• Capacity Planning – Identifying the size and scale for future capacity requirements.
All of the above principles and concepts are considered ‘best practice’ and are advised to be applied in a traditional Performance Testing Model. Clearly time and budget are constraints, but if the investment is available it is certainly worth the while to ensure stability and sustainability to IT Projects longer term.
From our experience, there are a number of areas within a Performance Testing practice or function we can provide a significant value proposition, these include:
• Senior Management Expertise – Strong Non-Functional Test Strategy & Management
• NFT SME Capability – Providing resources that enhance delivery and provide subject matter expertise (SME) in Performance Testing and tooling.
• Performance Engineering – Optimised approach towards Architectural test analysis, Performance tuning with a focus on customer experience.
• Static Testing of Non Functional Requirements
• Non-functional requirements analysis and traceability

TestLogistics (www.testlogistics.net) is a leading provider of Testing Logistics Solutions (including Test Environments Management, Test Data Management, Harnessing and Test Lab Operations), Technical Testing Solutions (i.e. Performance Testing, Infrastructure, Security, SOA & Test Automation) & Senior Test Consulting Strategy.
TestLogistics provide top tier organisations with a range of services which enable significant improvements on quality, delivery and overall value.

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