Impact of testing on application performance and how to optimize Selenium tests

As per the recent report of Statista 2022, the largest app stores like Apple App and Google Play Store are the abode for around 3.48 million & 2.22 million applications. Google Play might have the bigger no. of apps accessible for download, however, the Apple App Store is doing a great job at monetizing its mobile app content. In the 3rd quarter of 2021, international customer expenses on mobile apps via the Apple App Store hit 21.5 billion $, undeniably crushing the still impressive 12.1 billion U.S.D of the Google Play platform.

The increase in app numbers has made it crucial for businesses to concentrate on app performance tests to match the accurate expectation of their customers, ensuring the desired reliability, speed, stability, and scalability, and ace the market competition.  A software app with mediocre or lesser performance metrics can result in a failure and a bad reputation to meet sales revenues. Performance is the major factor to detect the overall value of any website or web app. So, let us figure out what it is, why it is significant, and some of the important tools that will assist you to get started.

What is App Performance Testing?

App Performance Testing is the approach for evaluating how an application runs concerning stability as well as responsiveness under a precise workload. Performance testing is typically implemented to examine robustness, speed, reliability, and app size. The procedure incorporates “performance” indicators like:

• Server request processing times
• Acceptable parallel user volumes
• Web page, Browser, and Network response times
• Number and type of errors, processor memory consumption; that may be encountered with app

Without performance testing, the software app might suffer from the following issues:

• Poor usability
• Long response times
• Insufficient hardware resources
• Long load times
• Inconsistencies happen when the software app runs on various OSs.
• If multi-users use the software app simultaneously, the software app runs at a slower-than-average speed.

Releasing such apps to the market will eventually gain a bad repute and won’t meet the expected niche sales targets.

Load or Performance testing is a must for your APIs or website as it assists you to:

• Find your app’s behavior under extreme load.
• Know how many parallel users your app/ website can grip/ manage.
• Determine potential bottlenecks of your software app.
• Notice how slow the APIs or varied web services react under heavy load.
• Discover the breaking points of the tech stack used by your app.
• Know if any faults appear to the end users & how are these going to upset their journey.
• Discover if the variations done in the individual releases had a bad effect on the app’s performance behavior.
• Discover the number of concurrent users that can access your application without a heavy degradation of the user experience.
• Examine the time it takes for your server to respond to customers & understand if your site loads in a suitable amount of time.
• Discover hardware problems or hardware/ VM-centric issues, such as the limitation on the no. of file descriptors or threads configured on the system.
• Know if the database technology or the databases’ connections (Redis, Mongo, Postgres, etc.) signify a bottleneck in your app.

Effect of Testing on App performance

Testing can have a significant impact on application performance, both positive and negative. Here are some ways testing can impact application performance:

• Performance testing: It is a form of testing that assesses how well an app performs under definite conditions. It includes computing multiple performance metrics, like resource utilization, response time, and throughput, and detecting potential bottlenecks that can impact performance. Performance testing can aid optimize the software app’s performance by detecting and resolving performance problems before the app is launched.
• Baseline Testing: This is the purest form of performance testing. It tests how the system performs under normal conditions and prepares a baseline contrast with performance under a predictable load.
• Load Testing: This form of testing examines app behavior and performance against increasing load (requests). It helps monitor the response times, throughput, server conditions, and a lot more.

While performing the Performance Test, the QA team finds out the answers to the following questions:

1. While increasing the load on the application, to which value of load does the app behave expectedly? After what quantity of load does the app behave erratically?
2. Is there any sort of glitches concerning networks that can be addressed?
3. After what size of data does the software app slow down or crash?

• Scalability Testing: In scalability testing, the specific QA team augments the customer load on the software app and tests whether the app scales up to withstand this augmented user load. One can use testing outputs in software app development’s planning as well as design stages, which aid lessen expenses and mitigate potential performance glitches.
• Volume Testing: The software testingor QA team populates a huge volume of data in the software app’s database to examine the software app’s behavior. They differ in the database volume and examine the app’s performance under fluctuating volume loads.
• Soak Testing: It helps check the system’s susceptibility by running it over an extended period. A better Soak test approach is to begin the test on a Friday & leave it running over the complete weekend.
• Stress Testing: This form of testing find the volume load/extreme capacity of the system and specify the point where a system might actually break.
• Regression testing: It is a form of testing that guarantees that modifications to an app don’t affect its current functionality. Regression testing can have an adverse influence on app performance if it includes testing a huge number of test cases recurrently, which can consume noteworthy resources & slow down the app.
• Automation testing: Automated testing includes using software tools for automating the testing procedure. This form of testing can aid increase the speed and effectiveness of testing. It can also impact app performance if it includes performing a huge number of tests recurrently, which can count major resources.

Overall, App Performance testing can have a significant impact on app performance, however, it is crucial to strike a stability between testing rigor as well as a performance optimization. Performance tests should be done in a way that assists detect and fix performance errors without negatively influencing app performance.

How to Conduct Performance Testing?

As QA testers can run performance testing with distinct kinds of metrics, the procedure can vary immensely. But, a generic procedure might look like this:

1. Identify the test environment- This comprises the test & production environ, as well as testing tools. Understanding the software, hardware, and network configurations details aids find possible performance errors, as well as assists in forming better tests.
2. Identifying & define adequate performance criteria-This must comprise performance objectives & constraints for metrics. For instance, well-defined performance criteria can be throughput, response time, and resource allocation.
3. Plan the performance testing- Test every single possible use case. Build test cases & test scripts concerning performance metrics.
4. Configure & implement test design environment- Organize resources to prepare the test environ and then execute the test design.
5. Run the test- While testing, software developers must also monitor the test.
6. Analyze & retest- Glance over the resulting test data & share it with the QA project team. After any fine-tuning, retesting to see if there is a decrease or increase in performance.

Companies must find test tools that can better automate their performance testing procedure. Besides, don’t alter to the test environments between tests.

Performance Testing Tools

For tool selection, you must consider multiple factors like platform hardware requirements, support, license cost, and the assisted protocol. A few famous performance test tools are as follows.

• Apache JMeter

JMeter is a free and open-source tool for performance & load testing. It examines and measures the performance of web & web service apps.

• HP LoadRunner

HP LoadRunner tool has a virtual user generator, which can simulate the exact actions of live human users. The tool can simulate 100s of 1000s of users. Hence, it can subject the software app to real-life loads & then discover the behavior of the software app in this condition. In the current market, this is tool with huge popularity.

• LoadNinja

This incredible tool is a cloud-centric load tests tool. The QA team records & then immediately playbacks holistic load testing without intricate dynamic correlation. Then, the expert QA team runs the load testing in real-time browsers. The outcome is that this tool decreases load test time & boosts test coverage.

Best practices for Performance Testing

Executing performance tests using best practices for every phase (Planning, Development, Execution, & Analysis) guarantees this endeavor will be successful. Let’s understand the best practices for every step.

1- Planning

The QA team must attempt to locate the common workflows (i.e., business scenarios) that it should test. They must also devise planning for the load test that incorporates a whole gamut of workflows beginning from light usage, scheduling to medium usage, and ending with peak usage. The team has to run various cycles of load testing. With this in mind, it must perform two things. The first is to come up with a test framework where the QA team can utilize similar scripts frequently. The second is to have the scripts backed up.

The team also needs to predict the duration of the specific testing. It can state durations like one day, eight hours, an hour, or one week. Usually, tests of extended durations depict sundry major flaws (such as OS bugs, and memory leaks, among others). Some enterprises use the APM (Application Monitoring Tool). If it is so, then the QA team can include this APM while running the test. The outcome of this endeavor is that the team can effortlessly find the performance errors, along with the key cause of such issues

2- Development

When the QA team is performing script development (i.e., recording), the testing team should coin meaningful transaction names. They must base such names on the business flow names written in the planning phase. The team should never record 3rd-party apps.

The team even utilizes the Automatic correlation trait of the tool to correlate the dynamic values. But, the team can’t correlate all these values. The proper technique to control such errors is that the team must run a manual correlation. The team should also design the performance tests to facilitate not just the Cache Server yet also the software app’s back end.

3- Execution

In performance testing, the eventual aim is to simulate a realistic load on the software app. Hence, the team must implement the tests in an environment alike the production environment. This must be applied in the circumstance of all factors, such as Load Balancers, Firewalls, and SSL (Secure Socket Layer), amongst others.

Hence, to test software apps in real user conditions, the expert software testing team can leverage real-device cloud without managing the hassle of in-house device labs. In such a way, QAs can make certain that their outcomes are always perfect. By confirming error-free and comprehensive testing, one could avoid major errors from making their way into production, therefore allowing apps to provide a better user experience.

Subscribe to the LambdaTest YouTube Channel for automated testing tutorials around  Appium, Playwright,  Selenium, and more.

4- Analysis

Initially, the QA team should add a slight count of counters to the app. When the testing team comes across a bottleneck, the QA team must add extra counters concerning the bottleneck. If the team analyzes this mode, it can simply detect the problem. The reasons for the app’s failure can be many. Some of these can be that the app responds at the slowest speed, responds with an error code, fails the validation logic, or fails to respond to a request. The software test team must consider every single reason & then deduce a conclusion.

Testing on App Performance & how to optimize Selenium tests

Performance Tests can have a major impact on app performance, and Selenium testing is no exception. Here are a few ways testing can influence app performance, and how to optimize Selenium testing:

1. Influence on app performance: Running Se (selenium) testing can consume noteworthy resources, counting network bandwidth, memory, and CPU. Running a huge number of tests or reiterating similar testing multiple times can slow down the app and affect its performance.
2. Optimize Selenium tests: To optimize Se (Selenium testing), consider the following:

• Use headless browsers: Using headless browsers can assist reduce the number of resources consumed by Selenium testing.
• Parallelize test runs: Running testing in parallel can help lessen the time taken to execute tests & decrease resource consumption.
• Use suitable wait times: Using suitable wait times can aid ensure that tests don’t unnecessarily consume resources and wait for app components to load before cooperating with them.
• Optimize test scripts: Optimizing test scripts by reducing the number of pointless interactions & reducing the no. of assertions can help control the resources consumed.
• Use selective test suites: Performing only necessary test suites and prioritizing higher-value tests can help lessen the number of tests runs and minimize resource consumption.

Overall, testing is crucial to guarantee the reliability and quality of an app, but it is also crucial to optimize tests to reduce their impact on app performance.

Conclusion

App Performance testing is a critical facet of software development that guarantees the application’s reliability, scalability, and stability. With the aid of accurate methodologies as well as tools, performance testing can be an effective and efficient way to guarantee your software app’s constancy.

LambdaTest Selenium Automation Grid is a powerful tool that enables you to conduct comprehensive end-to-end automation testing on a secure, reliable, and scalable Selenium infrastructure. With LambdaTest, you can effortlessly run automated cross-browser tests using Selenium scripts on over 3000 plus OSs and browsers environments, offering you with huge test coverage in a fraction of the time.

By leveraging LambdaTest, you can thoroughly evaluate how well your web application renders when accessed through a variety of different browsers. Additionally, LambdaTest Tunnel allows you to conduct automated cross-browser testing of your locally hosted web pages. With LambdaTest, you can achieve greater efficiency and accuracy in your testing, ultimately delivering better results for your web application.

Empowered by LambdaTest, we used a cloud-centric solution for remote Selenium Grid to attain parallel cross-browser testing across multi-platforms.

FAQs

1- Why should you consider app performance testing?

There are several reasons why you should consider app performance testing:

1. To ensure a positive user experience
2. To identify bottlenecks
3. To reduce downtime and maintenance costs
4. To improve scalability
5. To meet user expectations

2- Are there any specific types of applications that need performance tests?

Websites or web applications that receive high volumes of traffic, any application that has a client-server-based system, necessitates performance testing. For instance- social media apps or e-commerce platforms such as Amazon or Walmart.

3- What is the primary difference between website performance testing and mobile app performance testing?

The primary difference between mobile app performance testing and website performance testing is the device and platform on which the app is being well-tested.

Website performance testing concentrates on the performance of the site on several web browsers & devices, counting laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. The testing assesses the site’s performance concerning page load time, rendering of the content, server response time, and overall user experience amid distinct browsers & devices.

On the flip side, mobile app performance testing is precise to mobile devices and concentrates on the performance of the application on varied Oss and devices, such as iOS or Android smartphones and tablets. The QA tests evaluate the app’s performance in terms of stability, responsiveness, memory usage, as well as battery consumption. Mobile app performance testing also takes into account the factors such as network conditions, and the reliability, and availability of the cellular network or Wi-Fi connection.

Another core variance is that mobile apps are usually installed on the device, while sites are accessed via a browser. This means that mobile application performance tests might also include testing specific device features such as GPS, camera, or accelerometer.

Overall, while both mobile app and website performance testing share some common components, such as stress testing and load testing, they vary in the device and platform on which they are tested, and the precise performance features and metrics that are evaluated.