Testing Environment for Performance and Load Testing

15 Nov Testing Environment for Performance and Load Testing

Software testing is an indispensable step in building a software product as it evaluates and verifies the performance of the product under varying conditions. Such a testing process in its endeavor to ensure that the final product is flawless in terms of functionality and design, identifies errors, externalities, and gaps that exist in the product.

Performance testing aims to identify the key performance parameters including speed and scalability of the software under different workload conditions. For such tests to be accurate and close to reality, it is highly essential that the testing environment is identical to the production environment.

Performance testing determines

• If the application is responding quickly to the user
• The maximum workload that the application can handle at a point in time
• The stability of the application under varying workloads

Importance of test environment in software testing

Today’s world is different from what it was yesterday, so is the software development industry. A half-baked product with defects could ruin the developer’s prospects and reputation in the industry.

A testing environment must be set up and configured as per the parameters and type of the application under test. Such a test environment should be a close replica of the production environment and have essential software, hardware, and networking components that enable the identification of defects and bugs in the applications, modules, and data import configurations. It should also have the capabilities to train the users without actually distorting the intended operations and applications.

Building such a testing environment or sandboxes may prove to be costly and time-consuming at the very first thought, yet a well-built test environment reduces problems, cost, and time in the long run. The cost invested in building such a testing environment outweighs the cost and risk that could incur due to defects being left unnoticed when the product hits the live environment. Thus, setting up a test environment is a crucial element in the implementation plan of software projects.

Given the above, it becomes evident that the quality of the testing environment is an important determinant of software functionality and client satisfaction. Such a testing environment should be maintained to be used for future testing implementations.

Testing environments are also important while migrating to a production environment. While migrating solutions, a test environment can serve as both source and target environment, securing tasks and data during the migration process. Thus, building a single test environment that can handle all configuration changes and business applications is the best bet you can ever make.

Staging or pre-production environment for load testing

Pre-production testing or staging is important if one intends to do testing in production. Testing in production does not call for deploying an untested code, but passing your data, codes, and configuration through the pre-production environment or staging phase and identifying as many defects as possible. Thus, to ensure that the product performs well and meets the desired expectations in the production environment, one needs both a testing and staging environment.

Though there might be difficulties and high costs involved in building the staging environment with all the infrastructural and architectural requirements to closely match the production environment, performing load testing at the pre-production stage could help identify and fix the bugs before release. Large businesses invest in building a staging environment with resources and configuration identical to the production environment due to its importance. Maintaining the staging environment is a costly affair to small organizations and start-ups. A staging environment with at least 60% of resources that exist in the production environment produces valid results for load testing. The test results cannot be carried over to the production environment, otherwise. It must be noted that it is impossible to carry over or apply the testing result of one architecture to the other.

When resources in the staging environment are lower than that of the production environment, we use comparison load testing. While doing so we compare the performance of 2 releases and arrive at a test result.

We also calculate the difference in the number of resources between the staging and production environment using a stand correspondence coefficient, in addition to the above-mentioned comparison load testing.

What is a stand correspondence coefficient?

In the testing phase of the project, we identify the maximum performance at staging and production environment, and the value of these parameters are used to calculate stand correspondence coefficient, which helps in comparing the resources in both the environments. Thus, it helps in arriving at important conclusions regarding the performance of the system in a production environment.

Where,

Lmaxproduction is maximal production performance,

Lmaxstaging is maximal staging performance.

While comparing we do the following-

• Check if the key performance indicators are close to the coefficient
• Check if bottlenecks in both – staging and production are the same.
• Check the differences between the hardware used in staging and production
• Check if there are bugs that impact the accuracy of the test result

Conclusion

As mentioned above, a staging environment is primarily intended to perform a final integrated test in a pre-production environment. The fact that it can be used for approvals and demonstrations before making the actual project live makes every penny that you spend in building a staging environment worthwhile.

It is not always possible to build a staging environment with resources akin to a production environment. During those times, we tend to do component-wise load testing while testing modules, and we also replace the connected systems with proxies and mock-ups. To speed up the tests, we replace systems that are not generating enough load with similar load from other components.

Thus, the shrinking product development cycles demand the development and deployment of agile testing mechanisms. Unlike the conventional approach that tests the project after its completion, modern project management requires that the testing and development go hand-in-hand. Performance testing and validation start at an early stage where each component is tested end-to-end after being built and integrated into the assembly.