|
The intent of load testing is the same as functional testing or any other type of testing: to find problems before the end users do. However, load testing is not the same as functional testing. Some of the common terms we use are benchmarking, load, stress, scalability, reliability, monitoring load describes some of the various performance tests you would use to get the measurements you need.
Load testing has its own unique issues and its own critical success factors. This article describes some of the critical success factors that are unique or are particularly meaningful to load testing.
As with any project, the planning stage is the most critical to the project's success. Analyze the project business requirements and functional requirements and visualize the real time scenario as end user point of view and get the load testing software and hardware needs and set approach foundation .Load testing is not single group activity to come to final answer it involves with different groups such as application development , network ,administrator, project managers and QA team. Planning, coordinating and communicating must be done well to ensure the project's success.
Define
Goal Setting. The first step in a successful load test planning process is to define the specific goals of the project in objective terms. We find it useful to express the goals in the form of questions whose answer can only be a number or a yes/no. For example, "how many users can run login entry while maintaining 8 second response time or better for 90% of their transactions?" or "What is the interval time for each users group?" or "Is ramp-up and ramp-down process is required when load is increased?”. Goals should also have constraints to bound the questions. It is not enough to ask how many users can run on an application; we must also specify what the acceptable response time performance is.
Unlike a lab for functional testing, a load test lab must be configured the same as the production environment in terms of component capacity and speed, otherwise the load test may not be accurate or even meaningful. For example, if a production machine has three CPUs then the test lab should be configured with a four CPU test machine. Set the all possible goal settings and estimated results before implementation.
The intent of load testing is to emulate what real users will be doing with the application when it is deployed.This is the part where the QA team intensive workouts helps to develop load scripts and implement the execution part.The scripts that are being executed should get the information about how users typically accomplish a particular transaction, how often transactions are performed, and how many users perform the transactions and transactions response time , failed transactions and error message logs.
Remember to communicate with network group/team for monitoring. It is the team work success to get more accurate results .It is important to note that what are other modules are running and what is the load balance of other modules while load testing is performed.Response time measurements indicate whether you have a problem and how bad it is, but they do not tell you why you have a problem, what the root cause is, or how to get rid of it. For that information you need to monitor the individual components in the application architecture. The components may include a web server, application server, database server, network and network elements such as firewalls, operating systems and server hardware.
Analyze Repeat the cycle again after developer tweeks to the module and compare the load test results.
By Joseph Vijaya BR Kodadhala.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||