1. Selection of wrong performance testing tools:
This is a common challenge and in many situations the most appropriate performance testing tool is not selected. This tool selection depends on a number of factors such as application communication protocol, application technology stack, skill-level of the performance tester and the licencing cost of the tool.
If a wrong tool is chosen, then it might lead to loss of testing days for getting the test scripts to work and it is necessary that the chosen performance tool should recognize the controls of the application under test.
Solution:
It is necessary for the QA manager and the QA team to properly evaluate the application under test (AUT) along with licencing cost involved, and then choose the best performance testing tool to ensure success of the testing process.
2. Lack of proper test strategy & test coverage:
There is a lot of effort involved in designing a comprehensive testing strategy which takes care of identifying and prioritizing project risks and deciding on what actions to be taken to mitigate them.
This testing process involves identifying application performance characteristics, planning appropriate tests to exercise those characteristics, simulating real user interactions, testing of API services and testing whether all these services are working or not as part of the test strategy. Due to the lack of proper brainstorming while creation of test strategy and test coverage, it becomes difficult to get effective performance test results.
Solution:
The performance team should spend significant effort on analysing and understanding application architecture and other performance characteristics like load distribution, usage model, geography of usage, availability requirements, resilience requirements, reliability requirements, technology stack etc.
A proper and clear testing strategy should be developed to ensure validation of these performance characteristics to get effective performance test results.
3. Time and budget constraints:
Load testing essentially takes some time and budget to get effective results. Due to the lack of proper planning during software development, allocation of resources or budget is not done. This leads to dependence on low-skilled resources, who do not understand full scope of performance testing activities.
It also might lead to usage of open source tools which might lead to increased project risk. All these factors impact the quality of overall performance testing process.
Solution:
Therefore, at the beginning of projects, it is essential for businesses to plan for proper performance testing activities accounting for required timeframe, resources and proper budget allocations.
4. Lack of knowledge about need for performance tests:
Most stakeholders and budget makers do not recognize the value of performance testing during software development. In most instances, post production release of software, many performance issues may crop up which might result in crashing of the website, app or software.
Solution:
Evidently, it is essential for the stakeholders, product owners or test architect to plan for performance testing as part of end-to-end testing strategy. These applications should be performance tested exercising web servers, databases and third party apps to ensure effective performance.
5. Improper analysis of performance test outcomes:
This is indeed a significant challenge faced by many testers as a good amount of system and application knowledge is essential to deeply analyze the performance test results.
Solution:
An experienced performance tester should perform the testing process who will be able to judge the scenarios and could continuously refine the tests and keep adding tests to make them consistent. The performance tester should be well aware of application architecture.
Also, the performance tester should have experience across OS concepts, web architecture, OSI model, networking concepts, data structures, client-side performance concepts and server-side performance concepts. These performance experts will be able to quickly analyze the test results.
6. Difficulty in conducting tests on production environment:
Conducting load tests on a fully functioning production environment is a challenge. Especially while testing in such situations, real-time users are using the product and any change to the production environment might affect the user experience.
Solution:
It is essential to closely monitor the trends in the production environment in order to spot out irregularities. The performance testing activities should ideally be planned in production like environment instead of actual production environment.
If business needs demand execution in actual production environment, such activities should be executed only during off business hours with sufficient time in hand for any corrective actions in case application crashes under load in production.
Earlier, load testing was mostly taken up to simulate basic user actions at a protocol level. But, today with more complex applications in place with intricate user actions, load testers might need to balance between automation and exploratory testing to handle these new technology complex applications.
Conclusion:
Performance testing is a non-functional type of testing that is performed to ascertain how the system performs under varying load conditions. The speed, scalability, reliability and resource usage of the software or the application is evaluated with this type of testing. It is essential for business websites especially eCommerce sites and mobile apps to get performance tested to ensure they scale up when numerous users access simultaneously.
There are many types of performance testing methods that can be adopted to test the software. But, typically while performing this testing method, the QA teams tend to encounter certain challenges. Specifically, the QA teams need to follow certain measures to overcome these above listed challenges to deliver stable and quality software.
Last but not the least, it is essential for businesses to leverage performance testing services provider to be assured of scalable, stable and high-performing software.
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