Performance Testing Overview

An application might function flawlessly when running with a few careful testers who exercise it in the intended manner. However, when a large number of users are introduced, the application is likely to slow down, encounter functionality problems or crash altogether. Developers and testers need to know if the application is going to deliver the performance they need at the expected user load.

Performance testing is the process of exercising an application with multiple users and verifying whether it functions correctly under anticipated traffic levels, patterns and combinations. Performance testing helps organizations understand how the system will fare in real-life situations so that load-related problems can be anticipated and even prevented.

Parasoft’s performance solutions provide intelligent virtual users and sophisticated ready-to-run load test scenarios that realistically simulate user requests. Users can select preset or customized load test scenarios. Preset scenarios include bell curve, buffer test, linear increase and steady load. The solutions are available for HTML, XML and Web Services environments.

Theses solutions do not simply look at the response time and rates delivered for various load scenarios; rather, they run tests that define and measure what problems, in addition to slow load times and rates, might occur in different situations. These tests identify load scenarios that can cause problems such as bottlenecks, transactions that are slow or do not execute correctly and pages that are slow or do not load correctly.