Continuous Performance Regression Testing

“Application Testing Services Market Worth 50.14 Billion USD by 2022”

Based on organization size, the small & medium enterprises segment of the Application Testing Services Market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period

Today, application’s high performance is lavish but also a basic need for the business. Those days are gone when one had to apprehend customer/stakeholders about the benefits of performance testing. Now, organizations are only worried about the growing market change where they have to need to compete. Also, they have to get familiarized with the speed of changes to adapt time-to-market pressures. Hence, performance testing now becomes very crucial before the application goes live no matter whether it’s major or minor releases or sprint for an agile based project. There is no doubt that starting from requirement gathering to production analysis, application performance an utter importance.

Why we need regression performance testing?

Before discussing on continuous regression performance testing, lets discuss why performance testing is so crucial in SDLC.

• Provide realistic prediction before launching the application or before any minor release
• Pre-production performance testing results assist in finding performance hiccups and resolve those bottlenecks before going to production
• Performance benchmarking can be used which supports business continuity
• Assist in Capacity planning

There are also lot of intangible benefits from performance testing like improved brand identity, customer satisfactions.
Normally, performance testing takes place just before production release and don’t have much time despite having performance issues as going live is more important. On contrary to that, now a day, there are application changes which required to become competitive in the market.
So, the actuality is performance testing window is always very short and there are many releases and sprints throughout the year.
In a nutshell, early performance testing in SDLC phases covers all of the above concerns and it is like the sooner problems get identified, the sooner it can be fixed.
Performance testing team is required to test the application quickly, repetitively by closely working with the application development team to meet the application’s speed, scalability and stability.

Time for Continuous Regression Performance Testing

It is time to make continuous regression performance testing, a mandatory for all projects since early phases of SDLC, to avoid major failure and reduce overall development cost. Continuous regression performance testing is an ongoing activity. It is not limited to preproduction activity rather can be continued until post-deployment. This is absolutely required for leveraging flexibility, coverage and effectiveness.
Continuous performance regression testing always gives confidence ahead of deployment. It assures end-users for new features and eliminates the potential risk of arising new performance issues.

Advantages of Continuous Performance Regression Testing

• Quick exposure of performance bottlenecks: Once performance testing starts being performed in the initial stages of product development, the bottlenecks can be exposed – and thus fixed at the earlier stages.
• Saving of effort and costs: Since the bottleneck is exposed at an early stage and it may also be resolved earlier. This will reduce the time and resource requirements to fix the issues in a big way.
  It’s a known fact that a bug resolved during production will save up to 5 times the cost compared to one that is found once a product is released.
• Reduced Bugs: Small bugs if left unchecked may lead to more complex errors in the later stages of production. With the bugs being caught earlier on in the cycle, not only the complexity of the bugs will be easier to manage but also the actual number of bugs to be fixed will also be much more manageable.
• Stabilized Application: As an Agile environment requires continuous iterations, it leads to more frequent and rigorous performance testing, the applications become far more stable, and all major risks such as hard coding of values and memory leaks are taken care of, adding the required stability.
• Reusable scripts lead to saving of effort: There may be multiple scripts in the performance testing process that may be reused going ahead. This re-use may lead to effort savings of up to 60%.
• Boosts Confidence: Because the product gets tested on all its parameters and for functionality so many times on an iterative basis, the organizations confidence and faith in its product gets reaffirmed and they can be sure of a scintillating success story.

In Conclusion

Regression testing powerfully investigates code updates and their impact upon application relationships with dependencies and interfaces. The basic concept of regression testing is to ensure the product’s ability to perform intended functions uninterrupted by modifications or improvements.
By best ensuring that product upgrades and updates work the first time, regression testing is all about ensuring that the customers have a consistently viable product. If issues are found after release, regression efforts are crucial for smoothly fixing problems within application and performance frameworks.