Shifting from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering: A Guide and its Benefits

Performance testing is a crucial process for evaluating the speed, stability, scalability, accessibility, and responsiveness of websites, applications, and APIs. By simulating various user loads, performance testing aims to detect system bugs and bottlenecks, enabling their elimination through generated reports. However, relying solely on performance testing may not be sufficient. This article explores the concept of performance engineering, highlighting why it is necessary and how to make the shift. By incorporating an online chat component, organizations can further enhance their performance engineering efforts by providing real-time support and addressing user concerns promptly.

Performance Engineering: Going Beyond Performance Testing

While performance testing plays a significant role, it is considered a subset of performance engineering. The primary objective of performance engineering is to reduce unplanned infrastructure costs, development remediation expenses, service interruptions, and production tuning efforts. While performance testing is vital for system certification, it falls short when it comes to enterprise-wide certification of mission-critical software and hardware. Performance engineering aims to identify issues early in the development phase, employing measurable methods for cost-benefit analysis of hardware and software solutions. This critical distinction is one of the reasons why performance testing alone is insufficient.

Understanding Performance Engineering

Performance engineering is a proactive and continuous approach to application performance testing and monitoring. It fosters seamless collaboration among various teams, tools, and processes through continuous feedback loops. In performance engineering, quality assurance is not solely the responsibility of testers; developers, performance engineers, product owners, and business analysts also contribute. It represents a cultural shift in the way organizations perceive their essential processes, integrating practices and capabilities that enhance quality and performance across the organization.

By leveraging appropriate tools spanning developers to performance engineers, performance engineering enables the shift-left approach to performance testing and the shift-right approach to application performance monitoring. Understanding the departure from traditional performance testing is challenging without grasping the essence of classic performance testing.

Why Shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering?

Poor product performance can lead to various negative consequences, such as user dissatisfaction and loss of customers. In critical services, performance issues can even worsen the quality of life for users. For example, the NHS App experienced a significant outage in 2021, preventing users from accessing their COVID passes and essential public services requiring proof of vaccination. Performance testing often fails to uncover all hidden issues before product release. However, transitioning to performance engineering, which prioritizes performance from the start of product development, can substantially improve software quality.

Achieving Performance Engineering in Easy Steps

Step 1 – DEVELOP: Shifting Performance Left with Developer Performance Tools Functional testing has been shifting left for years, and performance testing is finally catching up. Shifting left involves performing activities earlier in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Step 2 – TEST: Accelerate Performance Testing with Flexible Cloud Infrastructure Traditional performance testing setups have been complex, but Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) test tools simplify the process. With cloud-based testing, the challenges of infrastructure acquisition and building are eliminated, as everything is hosted in the cloud.

Step 3 – RUN: Re-Use Assets to Monitor & Maintain Live Performance Developing a highly performant solution is essential, but performance engineering doesn't end at go-live. Unfortunately, very few companies conduct performance regression testing.

Benefits of Performance Engineering

Performance engineering enhances performance testing services, offering organizations several crucial benefits:

1. Enhanced User Experience & Quality The performance of an application significantly impacts the user experience. Any performance issue that causes crashes or improper functioning can deter existing and potential customers.
2. Reduced Costs Due to Early Defect Detection Performance engineering aligns well with agile methodologies, taking a shift-left approach to address performance issues early in the SDLC. Unlike performance testing, performance engineering is driven by the business requirements, leading to cost reduction through early defect detection.

Conclusion

This article highlights the importance of both performance testing and performance engineering in achieving industry standards for websites and applications. Including performance engineering in the Software Development Life Cycle ensures high standards and optimized performance. While performance testing is often conducted after a website or application is established or in a production environment, both performance test engineers and performance engineers can benefit from using Load View to ensure high performance and conduct thorough testing before going live.