Performance Testing Types

Performance Testing Types

When it comes to performance testing, there are many abbreviations and an extensive terminology. Even worldwide testing boards have never announced an official list of performance testing types. If you’re curious about the different types of performance tests, you can find them in this article; Differences between Performance Testing, Load Testing and Stress Testing

There are specific situations that we address during performance tests. That situation changes the nature of test implementation. Let’s take a look at them.

Spike Test

The aim of a spike test is to determine the stability of an application or a system when there’s a sudden rush to it in a timely interval.

Business cases:

• An airline company drops the price of a domestic flight %50 for 1 hour for a marketing campaign. They send their customers a push notification about it. People rush to that website.
• After a workday ends, people who own a car turn on the map application to check the traffic.

Spike testing also verifies if an application recovers between periods of spike activity or not.

Volume Test

The aim of a volume test is to verify the state of an application when there’s a huge amount of data to deal with. Mainly apps, websites work fine at the first stages of its lifetime but after a while with the huge growth of data, there are some unexpected conditions. In order to keep up with the giving SLA’s, volume testing must be performed.

Business cases:

• Two finance companies are merging so 10 million new users will be migrated to the new system including their historical data. What will happen after the merge?
• An e-commerce company starts to work with new vendors and increases its product size 300%. How will search functionality work?

Endurance Testing

This test determines if the designated app works with any type of a problem during a long period of time. An application might work perfectly during a performance test but in the long run, there might be some memory leaks, garbage collection problem, etc. These problems may arise after a long period of time. Duration of the test is the key to address the problem.

Business Case:

• Black Friday is a whole day event and you never know when or where you might have problems. Just run your performance test for 2–3 hours or maybe longer.
• Game testing is very different than a web application testing. Mobile device might run out of memory after a long period of usage. Don’t play the game for a short period of time, play it longer.

Check out Loadium blog for more great content!

Have a good performance testing!