Performance Testing Life Cycle (PTLC)

Different stages involved in Performance Testing:

There are different stages involved in the process of Performance Testing. We will discuss about each stage in this page today.

PLANNING:

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• In this stage, Business team along with stakeholders and Performance Team are involved to discuss about the measurable and deliverable metrics. 
• After receiving the measurable from client, Performance Testers will validate the same whether they can doable or not.
• Business analysts from the business team will identify the scenarios which are in scope for performance testing. 
• Necessary application infrastructure details will be provided to PT team.
• Performance Testing tool will be selected (Open source or commercial).
• A Service level agreement should be made which has the requirements (which needs to be met) such as Expected response time, Total users needs to be supported by the application, CPU and Memory utilization of servers and Throughput etc.,
• Once the key scenarios are identified, Performance testers will go through knowledge sharing sessions where functional navigation of identified scenarios will be covered.
• A workload model (user load distribution) sheet will be provided by business team to generate total number of users across all identified scenarios.
• A high level Test Strategy document will be prepared by a performance test consultant which clearly states the entry and exit criteria of an assignment along with risks involved and timeline details.
• Business team will provide access to Testing team to access their application so that testers can walk through the application get idea on the same.

Not aware on terms such as Work load model, Throughput etc,? Don't worry, We will discuss about them in detail in our upcoming posts! :)

DESIGN: 

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• Once testers having all the inputs such as application details (URL, Login Credentials and test data), script development will be carried out in this stage.
• Now we have scenarios and navigation steps (received from planing stage). Using performance test tool , scripts will be designed for the scenarios which are in scope for performance testing.
• During Design stage, Front end application action will be recorded by Performance test tool once so that all the back-end network traffic of client server communication. will be captured by the tool.
• Performance testers will customize the captured data in such a way that a bunch of virtual users can use single script at a time and can be able to perform all actions successfully.
• As a part of script development , Recording front end action, Parameterization, Correlation and some custom codes will be involved in order to make a script ready for test.

EXECUTION:

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• Once the test scripts are ready, They will be executed/tested during this stage. Depending on the inputs such as total users, duration, ramp up of users and type of test, a script execution will be carried out.
• Usually a separate machine will be used to generate required number of user load while carrying out test executions.
• CPU,Memory and disk space utilization of servers will be monitored while carrying out test execution. By doing do, Any performance bottleneck from the server side (in terms of hardware) can be found.
• Necessary log files will be collected by performance testers post completion of test execution.

ANALYSIS:

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• During analysis stage, performance bottlenecks are identified. Testers will be analyzing the log files which will be generated by tool to find the client side issues.
• Also, Testers will be analyzing the server health in terms of its CPU,Memory and disk space utilization to find out server side issues.
• Once the performance problems are identified, They will be resolved during performance engineering process.
• Preparing a detailed report and making more understandable graphical representation of results will be covered in this stage.
• Suggestions/Recommendations for better application of performance will provided by testers.

In our next post, We will be discussing about the pre-requisites to start the performance testing assignment. :)