What’s Trending in Performance Testing in 2024?

Performance testing examines an application’s ability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness under a specific amount of workload. It is also referred to as load testing. Even though it is an important aspect of ensuring that the software’s quality is up to the mark, many businesses give it a stepmotherly treatment. It is often conducted only after functional testing is completed, and sometimes, only after the program is released.

There are a number of objectives for performance testing: computing processing speed, analyzing application throughput, network consumption, data transfer velocity, maximum concurrent transfers, workload efficiency, memory use, etc. Considered a subset of performance engineering, it is also called Perf Testing.

In this article, we are looking at some of the performance testing trends for 2024:

1. Using AI to automate testing

Since customer behaviour changes on a platform performance testing scripts are changed too. By leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning(ML), the activities of the real user on the platform and the user journey with their patterns can be unearthed.

Using these patterns, it is possible to create a performance testing model that will make sure your load testing scripts match with the real behaviour of the users.

Creating performance-based test models will help businesses find new issues in their testing system. AI-powered performance testing applications has the ability to optimize test suites as it reduces redundant test cases and ensures optimal test coverage by analyzing keywords. It can even identify unexplored areas in applications. Although artificial intelligence and machine learning have not yet became a part of regular performance testing practices, we will soon see them gaining traction in finding out problematic areas.

2. Chaos Testing:

Chaos Testing is a highly disciplined methodology to test the integrity of a system where you proactively simulate and identify failures in an environment before there is any unplanned downtime or a bad user experience. It involves understanding how the application will behave when failures happen in one or more parts of the architecture. There are a number of uncertainties in the production environment.

The objective of chaos testing is to understand how the system will behave if there are failures. It will also help understand if there will be any major issues if there are system failures. For example, if there is downtime in one of the web services, the entire infrastructure should not go down. Chaos engineering helps find loopholes in the system before the production process.

3. Self-service:

Performance is viewed differently by people in programming positions, DevOps, and security. The tools that we see these days are customized for each role and even allow technical specialists to use their own set of tools. IT operation specialists will want to see performance data in the same place where they get their work done so that they can take corrective action immediately. Programmers who can do performance work within their integrated development environment have bigger chances of keeping performance engineering work according to the development that is happening.

4. Synthetic Transactions:

When you monitor production, you will get to know how long requests will be live on the server, but it will give you no idea about the customer’s experience. Synthetic transactions help you understand what a user goes through as it simulates a real user.

Here’s what a synthetic account will do for a social networking site. The user can log in, go through their profile, view some of the posts that are uploaded on their feed, talk to ‘friends’ on the site, add ‘friends’, and so on.

Synthetic accounts can even simulate actual orders for eCommerce sites. When businesses track the real user experience, they stand to get a ton of data and it gives them an idea about issues, delays, and errors that customers face. It can also be used to find production problems quickly. It will help software vendors assess how their application is used by the users.

5. Testing in production:

Before opening the product to the public, it is wise to test it in production. When you do so, you can expose it to a minute part of the user base. It helps you find and fix problems immediately. There are teams that perform continuous delivery where it pushes every code change to the production line if it passes automated tests. The new code that is pushed, will only be available for select few developers internally. Some of the other strategies that are popularly used for testing include incremental rollouts, blue-green deploys, and A/B split testing.

6. Open Architectures:

It is the type of architecture with specifications that are public and makes adding, upgrading, and swapping components an easy affair. You will see more open architecture in 2023 as it allows for an efficient and cost-effective migration.

Performance testing is moving away from checking on browsers and towards using internet protocols and TCP/IP for performance monitoring. It asks for the parts to work together while measuring their performance in isolation. One of the most important elements of an open architecture would be a cloud-based environment.

7. SaaS tools:

Testers can set up and run tests at cloud scale within minutes. It is only made possible because of self-service, cloud-based testing, SaaS, and open architecture. When you work with legacy tools, they require significant setup and configuration. But when you use the latest technologies that we have discussed, all it requires are a few clicks. There is a great level of interoperability as well which increases the performance by a huge margin.

8. Changing requirements:

When it comes to testing apps in the traditional way, it is imperative that the testers know the objective of the software, they need to create requirements document and service-level agreements. Based on all of this, testing is performed on the application. On the other hand, DevOps-based development sees performance requirements as something that keeps changing with time. Performance engineering ensures that it monitors the systems, solves problem and arrives at solutions before it becomes significant enough to harm the customers’ experience.

9. Pooled systems data:

Dashboards are commonly used these days to monitor performance. Unfortunately, most of this data doesn’t take user experience into account. What a user sees on the screen appears in a dashboard different from the one that shows network performance. They do not take internal metrics into account.

Performance engineering takes output from the performance test and pushes those metrics into a monitoring tool that is used for both testing and production. It reduces debugging time and helps avoid reruns. The performance dashboard can be shared with the entire team or the stakeholders alone. It will be a big part of performance testing in the coming years.

10. AI/ML & Sentiment Analysis:

Machine learning algorithms can forecast with the help of patterns and helps you only create for the demand present. Sentiment analysis is one of the most powerful technologies that evaluates responses based on the customers’ emotions. It analyzes plain text and allocates a numerical score based on the sentiments expressed. You can gain a ton of insights directly through customers’ reactions.

Conclusion:

Performance engineering teams might not be a regular feature in all businesses yet, but it will become a part of the mainstream in the year 2024. User experience becomes more and more critical to the success of applications. Therefore, it becomes the driver for frequent releases, shorter development cycles, rapidly changing requirements, and so on. Thanks to this, software vendors have a user-focused approach to quality during each stage of the software development lifecycle. When done right, performance engineering enables software developers and quality assurance engineers to build the required performance metrics from the beginning itself.

If you are looking for a technology partner to take your performance testing to the next level, the team at Zuci can help you set up processes and policies for that. Get on a call with us to understand how we can assist your business

Looking to improve your product’s performance? Take a look at Zuci’s performance testing services and see how you can leverage Zuci for your business needs.