Performance testing is a complex activity where dozens of factors contribute to its success. The effective use of all these factors is necessary to get repeatable and consistent performance test results.
Recreating a production-like scenario is an essential part of the whole testing activity because minutest of the differences can completely invalidate the test results.
In reality it’s not so simple to achieve this challenging goal. Setting up the right performance testing environment is usually a challenging task.
The Challenges
How would you create that massive volume of users (virtual)? Setting up a low-overhead infrastructure to test applications with say million users is still a dream for many.
How would you induce bandwidth behavior within the virtual users to simulate bandwidth (3G, 4G, broadband) for virtual users accessing application?
How would you simulate a real WAN network within your controlled lab environment? I am sure you would want to test application simulating WAN characteristics within your environment like packet delays, drops, duplication, etc.
For these 3 requirements alone organizations use at least 3 different products (possibly from different vendors). Not to mention the infrastructure overhead involved in implementing all of this.
Addressing These Challenges
Cavisson performance test suite offers all of this in form of a single performance testing platform, however the products can be decoupled easily to work for individual requirements as well.
It’s one of the founding principles of continuous delivery that your integration tests and manual tests need to run in a “production-like” environment in order to have assurance of a stable release of the product. The more the production-like environment it is, the more confident you can be about the performance of your application or website.
Delivering production-like user volume, traffic pattern, network characteristics etc., that forces any potential issues to show up early in the lifecycle leads to immediate impact to the go-to-market timing and cost efficiencies of your mission critical applications.
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* Views expressed are my own *
Vanya Singh is responsible for go-to-market strategy of Cavisson Netstorm.
