Trends in Performance Testing and Engineering - Perform or Perish

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri
Cigniti Technologies

Rising competition across the business landscape is forcing enterprises to up their ante and leverage cutting-edge technology to reach out to their target customers. On the customer's side, the amazing array of diverse products and services is enough to drive frenzy, confusion, and demand. The tech-savvy and highly demanding customers of today want every application to perform 24 x 7, 365 days a year across a plethora of devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. Business enterprises are hard-pressed to cater to this segment of customers and are migrating to newer technology to stay relevant and competitive. They need to deliver products or services while focusing on personalization, customization, predictions, analytics, and user preferences, among others.


However, adopting the latest technologies can impact the performance of a software application in one way or another. It is only due to the improved performance of software applications that customers can adopt them and help businesses increase revenue. Performance testing services are an important part of the SDLC that help to determine if the performance of the software application is on target. Let us look at the performance testing trends that can help business enterprises score over their competitors and deliver superior customer experiences.

Leveraging performance testing services is necessary to prevent the software application from facing downtime, lag, or other issues. These services can help with easy tracking of issues that have the potential to impact the functionality, features, and end-user experience. The trends in performance testing and engineering are as follows:

Protocol-based load tests versus real browser-based tests

Traditionally, protocol-based load testing is used to test web pages and applications for multiple protocols such as IMAP, AJAX, and DNS. However, with React and Angular-based web development frameworks, a huge amount of computation has moved to the browser engine. So, neglecting performance load testing using real browsers can generate vague results and create performance issues. Since real users largely interface with browsers, QA testers should adopt browser-based load testing services, including choosing performance metrics for JavaScript and HTML/CSS code rendering. This will ensure the running of load tests that are very close to what real users are likely to face.

Shift-left testing

Here, application performance testing is run very early in the development cycle and is made part of each sprint. It aims to monitor performance metrics if and when a new feature is added to the application. This allows the QA testers to determine if the bugs or issues present in the code can cause performance degradation. A robust performance testing strategy should be set up so that performance tests are triggered at every new stage of development. Besides, the results of such tests should be compared to the performance trends of previous test runs.

Chaos testing or engineering

Chaos testing is about understanding how the application should behave when failures are randomly created in one part of the application's architecture. Since several uncertainties can take place in the production environment, chaos engineering can help identify such scenarios and the behavior of the application or system. It allows testers to understand if any cascading issues are going to be triggered due to the failure in other parts of the system. Such a performance testing approach can make the system resilient.

In other words, if one part of the web services or database faces sudden downtime, it should not affect the entire infrastructure. Chaos engineering can help find vulnerabilities or loopholes in the application so that any performance issues can be predicted and mitigated beforehand.

Automated testing using AI

Performance testing scripts are often changed based on customer behavior changes. However, with AI and machine learning, business enterprises can identify the patterns around the user journey and know what the real users are up to when using the software application or visiting the web platform. AI can help the QA team use a performance testing methodology to generate automated scripts that can eventually find new issues or vulnerabilities in the system.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned trends in performance testing can help business enterprises scale and adapt to the dynamically changing software development frameworks. By keeping abreast with the latest technologies and key testing trends, businesses can ensure stable applications, superior user experiences, and possibly customer loyalty.

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri is Manager, Marketing, at Cigniti Technologies

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Trends in Performance Testing and Engineering - Perform or Perish

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri
Cigniti Technologies

Rising competition across the business landscape is forcing enterprises to up their ante and leverage cutting-edge technology to reach out to their target customers. On the customer's side, the amazing array of diverse products and services is enough to drive frenzy, confusion, and demand. The tech-savvy and highly demanding customers of today want every application to perform 24 x 7, 365 days a year across a plethora of devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. Business enterprises are hard-pressed to cater to this segment of customers and are migrating to newer technology to stay relevant and competitive. They need to deliver products or services while focusing on personalization, customization, predictions, analytics, and user preferences, among others.


However, adopting the latest technologies can impact the performance of a software application in one way or another. It is only due to the improved performance of software applications that customers can adopt them and help businesses increase revenue. Performance testing services are an important part of the SDLC that help to determine if the performance of the software application is on target. Let us look at the performance testing trends that can help business enterprises score over their competitors and deliver superior customer experiences.

Leveraging performance testing services is necessary to prevent the software application from facing downtime, lag, or other issues. These services can help with easy tracking of issues that have the potential to impact the functionality, features, and end-user experience. The trends in performance testing and engineering are as follows:

Protocol-based load tests versus real browser-based tests

Traditionally, protocol-based load testing is used to test web pages and applications for multiple protocols such as IMAP, AJAX, and DNS. However, with React and Angular-based web development frameworks, a huge amount of computation has moved to the browser engine. So, neglecting performance load testing using real browsers can generate vague results and create performance issues. Since real users largely interface with browsers, QA testers should adopt browser-based load testing services, including choosing performance metrics for JavaScript and HTML/CSS code rendering. This will ensure the running of load tests that are very close to what real users are likely to face.

Shift-left testing

Here, application performance testing is run very early in the development cycle and is made part of each sprint. It aims to monitor performance metrics if and when a new feature is added to the application. This allows the QA testers to determine if the bugs or issues present in the code can cause performance degradation. A robust performance testing strategy should be set up so that performance tests are triggered at every new stage of development. Besides, the results of such tests should be compared to the performance trends of previous test runs.

Chaos testing or engineering

Chaos testing is about understanding how the application should behave when failures are randomly created in one part of the application's architecture. Since several uncertainties can take place in the production environment, chaos engineering can help identify such scenarios and the behavior of the application or system. It allows testers to understand if any cascading issues are going to be triggered due to the failure in other parts of the system. Such a performance testing approach can make the system resilient.

In other words, if one part of the web services or database faces sudden downtime, it should not affect the entire infrastructure. Chaos engineering can help find vulnerabilities or loopholes in the application so that any performance issues can be predicted and mitigated beforehand.

Automated testing using AI

Performance testing scripts are often changed based on customer behavior changes. However, with AI and machine learning, business enterprises can identify the patterns around the user journey and know what the real users are up to when using the software application or visiting the web platform. AI can help the QA team use a performance testing methodology to generate automated scripts that can eventually find new issues or vulnerabilities in the system.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned trends in performance testing can help business enterprises scale and adapt to the dynamically changing software development frameworks. By keeping abreast with the latest technologies and key testing trends, businesses can ensure stable applications, superior user experiences, and possibly customer loyalty.

Ajay Kumar Mudunuri is Manager, Marketing, at Cigniti Technologies

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Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

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77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

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In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

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Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

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