Performance engineering is gaining immense importance in the present-day software industry given the continuous deployment of applications by a growing number of DevOps teams. Performance engineers carry out regular and on-demand testing of application performance in order to ensure accuracy, quality and stability.
Enhanced performance engineering ensures the incorporation of user experience and managed application performance across the entire lifecycle of an application. Since performance engineering is a rigorous technique that underlines the performance and resilience of an application, it makes sense that performance engineers should follow some basic guidelines while looking to enhance performance engineering.
Learn the Basics of Modern Web Development Technology
Performance engineering skills are of little use if performance engineers lack adequate knowledge with regard to web development technology. A performance testing company would ensure that its performance engineers are acquainted with the modern web development stack which includes HTML5, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and SQL and database query tools. The knowledge of these concepts enables performance engineers to accurately identify a problem and immediately put together solutions.
Be Familiar with Effective Performance Testing Tools
For enhanced performance engineering, it is mandatory that performance engineers should have a thorough understanding of different effective testing tools. Some of the latest tools used for performance testing include Microsoft VSTS, HP LoadRunner, IBM Rational Performance Tester, and Silk Performer. In addition, performance tests may also involve the deployment of several tools for testing web services and a few open source tools.
Acquire Smart KPI Monitoring skills
Performance engineers should be able to smartly monitor KPIs in order to resolve bottlenecks. Frontend KPIs provide information about the current capacity, such as use load, TPS (transactions per second), response time and error rates. Monitored KPIs shed light on the performance story of the scaling of an application to a certain capacity. To achieve enhanced performance engineering, two extremely helpful KPIs that performance engineers should monitor are hit rates and free resources.
Identify and Isolate Tier-based Engineering Transactions
Performance engineers must know how to identify and isolate tier-based engineering transactions since it can help them in the analysis phase. Towards that end, it is pertinent for performance engineers to know that, in engineering scripts, a single transaction targets a particular tier — Web tier, App tier or DB tier – of the deployment. Performance engineers can isolate the tier on which they would be focusing their efforts at a given point of time, by degrading a specific engineering transaction.
Use Benchmarks as a Basis for Evaluation or Comparison
Enhanced performance testing requires the setting of benchmarks by performance engineers to gauge application performance. For performance testing services, a benchmark is a standardized test or problem against which other tests are evaluated or compared. For comparison, performance engineers would change one variable at a time and ascertain its effect against other tests.
Focus on Hardware in Addition to Software
Performance engineers should not focus merely on the evaluation of the software they are testing. They would also need to pay due attention to the hardware on which the tests are carried out. Hence, an overall performance analysis should involve a monitoring of the system memory, CPU, disk, and network usage. An understanding of resource allocation is important for enhanced performance engineering since it pertains to processing needs.
Run a Test Repeatedly for Performance Comparison
To get performance results that can be trusted, it is essential for performance engineers to run a single test multiple times. For reliable performance comparison of a test under the same conditions at different times, a test should ideally be executed at least three times. For better evaluation of the results of a test for the sake of performance comparison, the test should be run at least five times. Furthermore, several more executions of a test are required ahead of the final release of an application or software.
Ensure Good Automation
Good automation is one of the prerequisites of QA testing of an application and it holds great significance for performance engineering as well. Unless performance engineers ensure good automation, they cannot achieve successful performance engineering. Since good automation enables efficient analysis of test results, performance engineers must remain aware of the reasons and benefits of automation. Automation should be incorporated early in the testing process and testers must consistently gather metrics from the tests.
In Conclusion:
To conclude, the tips for enhanced performance testing can help performance engineers improve the scale, responsiveness and performance of an application. Trained analytical performance engineers can strive for enhanced performance engineering because of their acquired proficiency in quickly spotting glitches/bugs in software, identifying trends, proving or refuting theories, segregating bottlenecks and eventually delivering reproducible results. Our team consists of the best experts in this realm and more – connect with us to experience the best.
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