The Top 7 Types of Performance Testing

If you’re like most organizations, you know that you should be conducting performance testing for your applications – but you might be a little uncertain about what performance testing really is, or what options are available to you. Here’s a clarifying look at performance testing so that you can figure out which of these methods is right for your situation.

What Is Performance Testing?

As the name suggests, performance testing is intended to assess how well an application performs under certain specified conditions. The goal of performance testing an application is typically to measure one or more of three important factors: speed, stability, and scalability. Successful performance testing requires a clear picture of what you want to determine in each test, such as how much hardware you need in order to allow a certain number of concurrent users for the application.

Performance Testing Types

Baseline Testing

Performing baseline testing is like creating a control group in a scientific experiment: It’s used to determine how the application performs under a normal or expected load. This “baseline” is then compared to the results of other performance tests.

Stress Testing

Stress testing is the “classic” form of performance testing: running an application under a higher load than normal. This type of testing is used to find bottlenecks, bugs and breaking points that only occur under a heavy load, such as race conditions and memory leaks.

Capacity Testing

A special class of stress testing, capacity testing focuses on an environment’s capacity in terms of concurrent users and transactions to determine how much load the application can support while still fulfilling performance expectations. Capacity testing is often used to assess your application’s scalability.

Concurrency Testing

Concurrency testing is similar to stress testing and capacity testing but slightly different from both. During concurrency testing, multiple users test the application without pushing it to its limits. This kind of testing is often conducted at regular intervals to ensure that the application’s performance remains consistent over time.

Longevity Testing

The previous types of performance testing are usually concluded in a matter of hours. Longevity testing, on the other hand, seeks to identify problems such as memory leaks or timing-dependent issues that only occur infrequently or after the application has been running for a long time.

Regression Testing

Regression testing is conducted at regular intervals in order to verify that recent changes or updates to an application have not introduced unexpected behavior. Usually, regression tests assess the performance of several selected benchmarks to uncover negative trends.

Integrated Health Checks

Running an integrated health check, like getting a checkup at the doctor’s office, ensures that the application’s quality is preserved in the long term. During an integrated health check, activities such as synthetic transactions and URL probes are run at regular, frequent intervals in order to provide feedback about performance anomalies in real time.

How Datavail Can Help with Performance Testing

Datavail offers organizations an application performance management (APM) platform developed by Accelatis, which was recently acquired by Datavail. Our platform makes it easy to conduct in-depth performance testing, identifying issues before the software reaches production. Although used most frequently for Oracle Hyperion software, Datavail’s APM platform is built to work with any application of the user’s choice. You can learn more about this platform and the far-reaching benefits of performance testing in our white paper, Hyperion Performance Testing The Easy Way.

Unlike other performance testing solutions, which might take weeks to install, our APM platform can be up and running in hours, giving you full visibility into your application’s performance sooner. In the end, the speed and simplicity that our APM platform provides enables you to reduce costs and use better-quality software.

Datavail is a specialized IT services company focused on Data Management with solutions in BI/DW, analytics, database administration, custom application development, and enterprise applications. We provide both professional and managed services delivered via our global delivery model, focused on Microsoft, Oracle and other leading technologies.