In the software testing world, lots of times we come across terms like performance testing, load testing, and Performance Engineering. Performance Testing and Performance Engineering are often misinterpreted as one of the similar things. Performance testing is a sort of testing that simulates the rational end-user load & access pattern in controlled surroundings to determine the responsiveness, stability, and speed of the system. It demands reporting of system’s performance metrices which includes concurrent user loads supported, server throughput, transaction response time, etc., along with additional metrics reporting the hardware and software layer-specific performance metrics like code performance, server resource utilization, browser performance, etc., that aid in examining the potential bottlenecks that affects the system performance and scalability. The key objective of performance testing is not simply finding bugs and faults, but to get rid of performance-related bottlenecks that can impact the software product usability. Performance testing method comprises assessing software apps to ensure they will execute well under real-world workloads in a live environ.
On the other end, Performance engineering is a discipline that comprises systematic means, practices, techniques, and activities during each phase of software development lifecycle (SDLC) to meet performance requirements. It strives to build performance standards by concentrating on the architecture, design, and execution choices. For the same reason, performance needs to be proactively considered throughout the software development stages right from the requirement phase. In this proactive approach, a performance engineer is implicated precisely from the early SDLC phase to assure the system is built with performance ideology. There are some useful techniques available to validate performance at complete software development lifecycle stage even when a testable system is not obtainable.
Hence, Performance Testing and Performance Engineering compliment each other with providing required metrics for scrutiny in case software is not performing with the right criterion. Testing sites like inviul shares all the software testing and its performance related information. It is shared by Avinash Mishra who is Selenium trainer too.