The Shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering — Zerone Consulting
As the world moves towards a digital-first era, the demand for apps has increased exponentially. People, now, spend an average of about 3 hours on their phones per day. App developers are constantly on the lookout for ways to optimize performance and provide a better user experience.
The two most common parameters used by developers to ensure this are performance testing and performance engineering. Performance testing is the practice of evaluating how the system performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. Performance engineering is understanding how all the parts of the system fit together, knowing what metrics matter, and building in performance from the first design of the system.
Ensuring performance and functional excellence in short timelines can seem difficult, but shifting to a newer development strategy is essential to address this. That is moving from Performace Testing to Performance Engineering.
Difference between Performance Testing and Performance Engineering
Generally, performance testing experts monitor and analyze performance across numerous application types. Performance testing is the reason developers know what to fix in an application, or even what can potentially go wrong.
Performance engineering, on the other hand, is not about just identifying a bug. It analyzes the code to discover the root cause of the bug’s occurrence, lists down possible solutions and optimizes to resolve the issue. Testing does not end with reporting a bug; they must get rid of it and ensure that the application always meets its performance standards.
In short, performance engineering functions end-to-end throughout the software development cycle, whereas performance testing usually comes into the picture at the end of the cycle.
The need for the shift
In performance engineering, the entire development team works together and tries to provide error-free applications. From the onset, it functions with predetermined performance metrics in mind. This also lets engineers detect potential issues at the earliest.
If an issue arises or performance criteria are not met, a performance engineering approach carries out optimization on multiple levels — OS, software, network, hardware. There is a stable association between teams and everyone is aware of the app’s overall state of functioning at stages. A performance engineer has to ensure stable app performance by quantifying them into specific metrics. This gives the entire team end-to-end transparency on the process and makes it easier to identify any issues in the system.
How can an enterprise make this shift?
Forming the Right Team: This is the most crucial part of making the shift to performance engineering. The team must include individuals who are comfortable with all aspects of the application — from development to market. In this approach, goals for the entire team are set collectively in the beginning.
Incorporate Automation: It is important to automate testing as far as possible to shift toward performance engineering. Automated app testing makes engineers write test cases for a large number of the functions of the app, while manually testing newer updates. This ensures that the newer changes are not disrupting the application’s general functionality.
Deciding Right Metrics: The performance engineering team should have decided on a set of metrics to measure application performance and user experience. The cross-functional construction of the team means that every individual must have thorough clarity on the final goals. This ensures that every team member knows what their efforts are focused on.
Jump Early On: The change to performance engineering should take place at the onset of a new project. If the team views performance as a whole in the early stages of the development lifecycle, the end product is likely to be faster, more constant, and proficient.
The change from performance testing to performance engineering is the future of application testing and development. Making this change in your process will ensure that your organization’s applications have a competitive advantage over the others in the same space.
Originally published at https://www.zerone-consulting.com on December 31, 2020.
