This is to talk about one of the challenging areas in Software Development. It is nothing but Performance Testing. From the name itself, you know that, it is one type of testing. But really it is more than that. It should be termed as Performance Engineering. But discussions in this site are restricted to only testing aspects. The reason is, author does not have enough knowledge to talk about Performance Engineering aspects of that. All the details are from from author's Performance Testing experiences. This is not intended to talk about tons of performance testing methodologies but some of the interesting aspects of that. And some tips to give you an edge in this area.
Real World Applications and Performance Testing
How many times you got irritated because of slow internet at home or cafe? Have you ever had issue of sending an SMS on New Year night? Many times you told that "It is slow". Well, you never knew that you did performance testing. But you really did without a tool, without a process. You just measured the speed of the computer. So speed or time is the best way to measure the performance. Have you ever thought of, why your gmail is slow at internet cafe? It was fast when you tried in broadband connection. Wasn't it? So gmail is never slow, because you accessed the same gmail from 2 different places. It could be the Desktop PC, or it could be the internet connection. Or it could be too many people accessing the gmail. On New Year night almost everyone is trying to send an SMS, that is why you have tough time to send it.
Above mentioned scenarios are some of the real world performance issues and the thought process to measure and determine the root cause of it. Now so called Performance Testing is a process to do the testing in a systematic way even before application being used by the end user in order to avoid above mentioned performance issues. Isn't it interesting?