Independent Software QA Testing Services

Performance Re-engineering 101

A Complete Guide to All Things Performance Re-engineering

Introduction

Performance re-engineering, also known as performance optimization or performance tuning, is the process of increasing the efficiency, responsiveness, and resource utilization of a system, application, or process. It involves identifying and fixing performance bottlenecks, reducing response times, and increasing total throughput.

Performance reengineering is the radical redesign of business processes by deploying performance testing techniques to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, cycle times, quality, and end-user satisfaction.

Performance reengineering is a process of improving the quality of software. It is a systematic approach to changing an existing system’s structure and/or behavior, aiming to improve it. As opposed to just making minor changes or incremental improvements, reengineering involves changing much more than just code: it also affects people and processes around it. Reengineering is usually performed by a team of people with different skills and expertise (e.g., developers, testers, and project managers).

The goal of performance re-engineering is to ensure that a system performs at its best, meeting performance criteria and providing a better user experience. To reach the intended results, this procedure is frequently iterative and involves extensive study and testing.

Some common reasons for performance reengineering include:
  • Slow Response Times
  • High Resource Utilization
  • Scalability Issues
  • Increased Workload
  • Load Time and Page Speed
  • Database Performance Issues
  • Concurrency and Parallelism
  • Third-Party Integrations
  • Mobile Performance
  • Compliance with SLAs
  • Infrastructure changes
  • Competing Technologies
A product needs performance reengineering services when one or more of the symptoms listed above are present. Having trouble maintaining or updating a system is one of the most typical. Among the additional signs are:

Implementing new features: If you want to add new functionality to your existing app, it might be time for a reengineering project. That way, your engineers can build new features in a way that will make them easier to maintain and update in the future.

Growing resource management needs: As your business grows, so does your team which means more developers working on the same project at once. This can lead to errors and bugs that only get worse with time. A reengineering project can help ensure that new features are implemented consistently and safely by making sure all code follows best practices and is adequately documented for future use by other developers on the team.

Lack of customer satisfaction. Customers that complain about your software are a good indicator that you need to re-engineer it. Surveying current consumers might reveal valuable information about how to refine your product for future users.

Changes in market trends. If you are noticing changes in your industry or market trends that affect how people use your product, then it’s time to re-engineer it so that it meets those new demands…

The primary concerns and steps in performance re-engineering are listed below.
  1. Performance Analysis: Analyse the system or application’s current performance to start. Locate potential performance bottlenecks, such as high CPU or memory utilization, sluggish database queries, poor network response times, or I/O operations.
  2. Benchmarking: Define performance standards and metrics to precisely measure the changes. This enables you to assess the efficiency of your optimization efforts by contrasting the system’s performance before and after making modifications.
  3. Profiling: Profiling tools can be used to collect data on the application’s execution and resource utilization. This assists in identifying specific places that need to be optimized and provides useful insights into code hotspots and inefficiencies.
  4. Code Optimization: To improve application efficiency and resource friendliness, review and optimize the code. This could involve improving I/O operations, lowering memory utilization, minimizing computations, and optimizing algorithms.
  5. Database Tuning: Consider database tuning techniques like query optimization, indexing, and caching if the application largely relies on a database to increase the speed of data retrieval and storage.
  6. Caching: Implement effective caching techniques to save frequently accessed data in memory, eliminating the need for time-consuming calculations and database searches.
  7. Load Testing: Conduct rigorous load testing to replicate real-world usage scenarios and gauge the system’s response to varying user loads and stresses.
  8. Scalability: Make sure the system can scale effectively to meet rising demand. Future expansion and prospective increases in user traffic should be considered during performance re-engineering.
  9. Hardware and Infrastructure: To find potential performance limitations, evaluate the infrastructure and hardware at the foundational level. To improve performance, hardware upgrades or infrastructural improvements can be required.
  10. Continuous Monitoring: Monitoring the system should continue after performance enhancements have been made to verify that the desired performance improvements are maintained over time.
Organizations may deliver better user experiences, save operating costs, and increase the system’s capabilities by continuously optimizing and fine-tuning performance.
Performance Testing Services The Thought Frameworks Way!
Introduction
One of the critical software testing practices in software quality assurance is Performance Testing. In any Software Development Life Cycle, the software applications will have performance bottlenecks. The goal of Performance Testing Services is not to find bugs but to identify and eliminate those performance bottlenecks, which in turn will have a positive impact on the software application’s speed, responsiveness, and reliability. Software Performance Testing makes way to meet the expected service levels in production.
Definition
Software Performance testing is a non-functional software testing, it is the practice in which the system is evaluated for its performance, responsiveness & stability of a computer, network, software program, or device under a particular workload. The key aspects like speed, robustness, and reliability are evaluated.
Significance

Why is Performance Testing & Engineering required?

To identify the database and API-related issues.
To enhance the website’s performance, stability, dependability, reduce risk and more importantly enhance the brand reputation.
The success and productivity of the application depend directly on planned and properly implemented performance testing which is the key to an effective holistic digital strategy
To ensure a positive customer journey/user experience.

Repercussion

What happens when Software Performance Testing & Engineering is not done?

As per industry experts, “Two hundred and fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number for competitive advantage on the Web.” Harry Shum, Executive Vice President of Technology and Research, Microsoft.

  • The quality of end-user experience is compromised
  • Failure to address application performance issues promptly results in critical transaction failure, inconsistent performance across browsers, and application inaccessibility in specific locations.

It is good to predict and be prepared for any issues that can arise in the web application delivery chain. Performance issues can delay the web application launch.

Performance Testing Methodology
There are several performance testing methodologies, each designed to target specific aspects of the system’s performance. Here are some commonly used performance testing methodologies.

1. Load Testing:

  • Load testing involves simulating a specific load (number of users or transactions) on the system to assess how well it performs under normal or peak usage situations.
  • The goal to make sure the system can handle the projected user load, it is important to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and monitor response times, throughput, and resource usage.

2. Stress Testing:

  • To evaluate the system’s stability and robustness, stress testing pushes it beyond its typical working limitations
  • Its goal is to find the breaking point and understand how the system reacts under excessive loads, which will aid in determining the system’s ability to recover gracefully after a stress phase.

3. Soak Testing:

  • In order to evaluate the system’s performance over time, soak testing includes running it under a sustained load for an extended period of time.
  • The objective is to locate performance degradation issues such as memory leaks, resource depletion, or other problems that may arise with prolonged usage.

4. Spike Testing:

  • Spike testing analyses how the system responds to a sudden, substantial spike in user load.
  • The goal is to see how well the system scales and handles sudden fluctuations in demand.

5. Scalability Testing:

  • Scalability testing evaluates the system’s capacity to handle increasing or decreasing user loads successfully.
  • It involves evaluating the application with varied user counts in order to detect performance bottlenecks and evaluate its capacity to scale both vertically and horizontally.

6. Volume Testing:

  • Volume testing involves testing the system to a high volume of data in order to assess its performance and efficiency under various data loads.
  • The purpose is to discover issues with database and data processing performance and ensure that the system can handle the predicted data volumes.

7. Capacity Planning:

  • Although capacity planning is not a testing methodology in itself, it does include leveraging data from performance testing to make wise choices regarding resource allocation and infrastructure needs.
  • It contributes to ensuring that the system can support current and future loads while meeting performance targets.

8. Real User Monitoring (RUM):

  • In order to evaluate the system’s performance based on actual user experiences, real-time user data, such as user interactions, page load times, and response times, must be collected and analyzed.
Choosing the appropriate methodologies depends on the objectives of the testing and the specific performance aspects that need evaluation. A combination of these methodologies is often used to comprehensively assess and optimize system performance.
Thought Frameworks Performance Testing Process

1. Identify Performance Goals and Metrics: Understanding the performance objectives and establishing pertinent performance measures are the first steps in the process. This process aids in defining precise performance testing objectives.

2. Plan and Prepare: The performance testing team creates test scenarios, plans test strategies, and sets up the test environment with the necessary hardware, software, and test data during this phase.

3. Create Test Scripts: Test scripts are developed to mimic user actions and interactions with the system. These scripts will be utilized to generate the load during the performance tests.

4. Configure Test Tools: Performance testing tools are set up to run test scripts and collect performance metrics such as response times, throughput, CPU utilization, memory consumption, and so on.

5. Baseline Testing: Baseline tests are performed to assess the system’s performance under normal usage with no load. These findings will be used as a baseline for future comparisons.

6. Performance Testing Methodologies:
Choose a suitable technique based on the testing objectives and the specific performance aspects that must be evaluated. A combination of these approaches can be utilized to examine and optimize system performance thoroughly.

  • Load Testing
  • Stress Testing
  • Soak Testing
  • Spike Testing
  • Volume Testing

7. Analyze and Monitor: Real-time monitoring and data collecting is used during test execution to examine performance metrics, spot bottlenecks, and watch system behavior in various scenarios.

8. Optimize and Retest: Performance bottlenecks are resolved and optimizations are put into place to enhance the system’s performance following analysis of the test findings. Then, to confirm the improvements, the performance tests are repeated.

9. Report and Recommendations: The findings, test results, issues that were found, and suggested courses of action to resolve performance issues are summarised in a detailed performance test report.

10. Continuous Monitoring: To ensure long-term stability and identify performance regressions, the system’s performance must be continuously monitored even beyond the initial testing period.

11. Continuous Performance Testing: Continuous Performance Testing enables teams to identify performance problems early, reduce the possibility of performance-related incidents in production, and keep application performance at a high level as the software develops.

Key Aspects of Continuous Performance Testing:

  • Automation
  • Early Detection of Performance Issues
  • Frequent Testing
  • Real World Scenarios
  • Integration with Monitoring Tools
  • Performance Budgets
  • Version Control Integration
  • Parallel Testing
  • Feedback Loop
Tasks involved in each of the Performance Testing Process stages

Tasks:

  • Understanding Application Under Test (AUT) Architecture
  • Non-Functional Requirements (NFR)Questionnaire – Identification and Understanding of critical scenarios
  • Understanding the details of the interface and the growth patterns
  • Getting the NFR document signed off by the Client
  • Performance Test Strategy

Tasks:

  • Prepare and review data setup for Performance Tests
  • Defining in-scope and out-scope
  • Defining Service Level Agreements (SLA)
  • Defining Workload Models
  • Prepare, and review Risks and Mitigation
  • Baseline the Performance Test Strategy document
  • Performance Test Design

Tasks:

  • Design and develop test scripts
  • Enhance the script for data parameterization
  • Perform Correlation for the dynamic data
  • Design the actions and transactions
  • Perform the unit testing of the developed scripts
  • Performance Test Execution

Tasks:

  • Design the scenarios as per the workload models agreed upon in the Performance test strategy
  • Execute the performance test scripts with the agreed user loads
  • Monitor the KPIs, and health checks of the Application Under Test (AUT)
  • Collect the Results and logs
  • Performance Test Result Analysis

Tasks:

  • Collect Transaction Response times, Page Response times, throughput, errors, Hits per second, etc.
  • Create graphs and charts
  • Correlate various graphs and charts
  • Prepare a detailed Test Report
  • Review and perform the analysis of the Performance Test Report
  • List down your observations and recommend performance-tuning areas for the engineering team
  • Generate and prepare a detailed Performance Analysis Report and share it among the Stakeholders
  • Benchmarks & Recommendations

Tasks:

  • Compare the results with the earlier execution results
  • Compare with the benchmark standards
  • Validate with NFRs
  • Prepare a Test report presentation
  • Baseline the Performance Report once reviewed
Timing

What would be the right time to do Software Performance Testing?

Performance testing can be incorporated into either the Waterfall Model (we wait until the end of the development cycle to begin Performance testing) or the Agile Model (we start the performance testing from the very beginning with unit tests).

Key stages during which Performance Testing is commonly performed

  1. Early Development Phase
  2. Integration Testing
  3. User Acceptance Testing(UAT)
  4. Staging Environment
  5. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment(CI/CD)
  6. After System Updates or Changes
  7. Periodic Monitoring in Production

Performance Testing Services Bug Hunt Process

The Thought Frameworks Software Performance testing and Engineering team helps the clients to identify, and overcome performance challenges and achieve highly responsive, reliable, scalable, and resilient mobile and web applications.

We at Thought Frameworks helped our clients to achieve –

  • Reduction in the % of average defect leak
  • We provide performance insight and accuracy in 4-6 hours
  • We ensure there is a 50% reduction in Software Performance Testing efforts
  • We suggest the best ways to reduce cloud and infrastructure costs

Value Addition

The Thoughframeworkers and their experience in Performance Testing
Adding value to Performance Testing requirements:

  • Increasing the Number Of Development Cycles
  • Achieving Resilience And Ease Of Execution
  • Providing greater scalability
Must Opt

Other testing services you must opt for along with Software Performance Testing?

  • Functional testing services
  • Automation testing services
  • Usability & Accessibility Testing
  • Security & Penetration testing
  • Cloud Native Application testing

Performance Testing Tools

  • Apache
  • JMeter,
  • NeoLoad
  • MicroFocus
  • SilkPerformer
  • MicroFocus
  • LoadRunner
  • Performance Center
  • Flood.io
  • Gatling

Application Performance Monitoring Tools

  • Dynatrace
  • Appdynamics
  • New Relic
  • Datadog
  • Perfmon
Team

With over a decade of expertise in applying industry-standard solutions to conduct performance testing & Engineering to meet our client’s expectations. Thoughtframeworkers are a team of SMEs who assists customers in deploying high-performing apps that meet or exceed customer expectations by leveraging an integrated set of enterprise-grade performance engineering solutions that include intelligent analytics and support extensive integrations with DevOps and application performance monitoring (APM).

About Thought Frameworks

Thought Frameworks is a U.S.-based leading QA and software testing organization that’s been in business since 2009, armed with the ultimate solutions for all your software’s QA testing challenges. Having headquarters both in California, USA, and a fully functional well equipped QA Test Lab in Bengaluru-India, that delivers premium QA and QC services endlessly across different Industry domains and niches. A CMMI Level 3 ISTQB Silver Partnered Company, our superhuman test team heroes have delivered numerous successful QA and QC projects for clients across the globe. Get powered by our deep dive bug-hunting process that helps your software in clocking release cycles on time while delivering excelling quality and functionality.

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