Road ahead for performance testing
- 1. Road Ahead for Performance Testing Overview The increasing usage of social media, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies also referred together as SMAC improves operational efficiencies and strengthens relationships with customers and end-users. There is a significant demand from customers, employees and end-users for responsive, anywhere accessible software applications that improve the areas of communication, business and entertainment. The increasing usage of social media is creating “Zero Tolerance” environment, as any failure, error or outage is resulting in immediate exposure to the global audience via social media channels. Organizations will be spending 52 percent of their IT budget towards QA and testing, out of which major allotments are 27 percent for cloud, 40 percent for big data & analytics and 17 percent for mobile. Performance Testing with Web Analytics and CMS How many of us are involved in load testing 3rd party web components like Flash, Silverlight & AJAX and feel that we don’t have any historical usage data to work with? We are not alone and there is a reason for that. Web server logs are not really great at tracking usage data for these 3rd party web elements. However, Web Analytics tools do a great job of tracking and reporting user activity on Flash-driven elements, embedded AJAX page elements, page gadgets, and file downloads and so on. But that was not the end. With more features in CQ5, CSS, HTML, Angular etc, the testing need to be more broad and easy to do. The tools for Performance Testing tool provider need to be one step ahead of the technology. Mobile Performance Testing Probably Mobility is the fast changing area in the era. With introduction of new O/S, new devices, New networks and new Testing tool, mobile testing is taking new shape in every dawn and again gets changed in the eve. The till now mobile performance testing, has very few skills in the market an even lesser tools also. Some testers use the very less efficient tools and some use only the scripts to automate the testing. Probably in the coming years or may be even months we will see many more tools to come in the market. Performance Testing should be able to support a wide range of devices and operating systems, which would help in the creation of multiple test scenarios / executions across multiple platforms. The development lifecycle of mobile applications is relatively compact as compared to a standard or a web application; hence it is always a challenge for software testing teams to complete the testing within the allocated time frame.
- 2. Big Data and Analytics Big data and analytics testing is a catching up trend in software testing domain. It is not only about testing vast chunks of data, but it is all about testing the correctness and accuracy of data (i.e. Obtaining a meaningful and actionable information), which is sourced from multiple platforms. As per my analysis, big data and analytics testing will account for approximately 50 percent of the total software testing budget in the year 2015. Big data and analytics testing applications are highly complex and pose a big challenge to the software testing teams. The software testing teams will be working with data centric processes and would not only be responsible to identify data irregularities and quality issues, but also figure out performance issues, security concerns, accuracy of ETL processes and most importantly verify, if the sourced data is relevant and suitable for business analytics. Cloud Performance Testing It would be considerably easy for software testing teams in the cloud environment, if they are provided the right environment and desired ramp up to an agreed load capacity. On the contrary, not all software applications can be hosted in the cloud environment e.g. large enterprise systems, which require robust integration testing would have to be hosted in a separate infrastructure test environments. However, the cloud testing trend is here to stay for a foreseeable future. Conclusion: After this concept testing, we may see the future to be more technical, challenging but easy and tool driven. But when we include all the four areas of SMAC, there is invention of a new avatar called Digital. The complete world starting from the ground people till the politicians are talking about the Digitalization
- 3. and digital channels. Really the technology will be successful with real implementation of digitalization. But it is more important to tell the people starting from the application designers till politicians that the applications and hardware are going to be used by billions of people across the globe. Is it not something that, the performance testing of the applications and hardware need to be reshaped with the skill and tools?