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Feature Friday – Performance Profiling for Web: A Powerful Testing Tool
Everyone loves a bundle deal. As a user or consumer, getting more for your value is always on the forefront of thought when making a purchase. From Home health and Auto insurance, too half off peanut butter and Jelly at the supermarket, getting multiple related items for a discount is a quality marketing approach which also provides great consumer offerings. In the realm of testing there are two offerings that are often required for optimal QA. As functional testing monitors user interface and experience, performance testing monitors the application’s integrity and accessibility, in action, with varying constraints. Both of which complement each other for comprehensive testing. Today’s feature Friday is brought to you by Linto and Milton who will discuss performance profiling for Web, and how this feature accompanies functional testing to provide a powerful bundle enhancing test building efficiency and overall test case coverage.
Tell us more performance profiling for Web offered by Qyrus, its use cases, and impact on testing and QA processes?
Milton:
Performance profiling allows users to observe all performance-based metrics within the reports of executed functional tests. WebPerformance information is vital for client web applications and provides network speeds, page load time, and other accessibility and performance related metrics while toggling stress and traffic. Performance profiling is also essential as it defines how smoothly an application runs which directly determines user experience.
Linto:
To be a little more specific, a user has a test suite with many test scripts. After execution, the user looks at the performance tab and can see which tests failed and passed. User can then go view and failed test and go back to fix them. User also can see how their website reacts to the test’s inputs. User can also stress test their website to check how the website handles traffic across a range of unique scenarios.
Does the same or similar functionality exist without Qyrus, and how do competitors address similar problems?
Linto:
That’s a great question, and though there are multiple solutions for performance testing and profiling in the market, users would have to download, deploy, and maintain multiple software’s or solutions to run web performance tests. This would require a functional testing and performance testing solution.
Milton:
Exactly, if end-to-end testing was required there would be a multiple solution approach, that requires a testing infrastructure rather than a single solution answer. Qyrus differentiates itself by placing both performance and functional testing into a single integrated solution placing all testing requirements in arms reach.
What is the overall impact of performance profiling on the testing process?
Milton:
Web performance testing allows for insight on application functionality across a range of different levels of usage. The ability to monitor the number of users accessing a webpage then analyze application performance in relation gives insights on application functionality and accessibility while simulating live settings.
Linto:
And this data is then formulated into graphs and visual reports that can be downloaded and shared across teams for collaborative purposes. The ability to reuse functional tests for performance also gives you all of these testing advantages with little overhead or resource consumption.
How might performance profiling for Web help testers, developers, and business technologists? What value can this feature bring?
Linto:
Testers often use the full length of the features capabilities in converting a range of their functional tests into performance tests as well. In doing so they can test webpage ability across scenarios and traffic analyzing the metrics and graphical reporting provided by Qyrus.
Milton:
The developer is able to, alongside testing functionality, check the load times against users simulating high and low intensity scenarios allowing them to optimize their web applications run times and loading speeds. Furthermore, testing responsivity of the web application at the page level.
Linto:
With graphical and visual reporting business analysts are able to build and execute functional and UI tests with performance metrics as well. In turn, analyzing exactly which pages and locations within the application are slow. Furthermore, accompanying this data with user analytics and general traffic metrics business analysts can further assist in the testing and QA process enabling high quality application development.
How do you see performance profiling for web impacting day-to-day operations across organization?
Milton:
Day-to-day operations is actually where we see the most impact with this feature. As test suites are built and new tests constantly created, the daily overhead of not having to build and maintain performance tests next to your functional tests becomes substantial. As one of Qyrus’ fundamentals is reusability, functional tests are now converted for performance analytics minimizing that overhead across all required test cases.
Linto:
Not to mention, performance testing itself is vital in the Quality Assurance process. As load and traffic increase web applications can begin to slow down, and any lag or timeout errors experienced by the users could lead to less user retention. But being able to test traffic patterns and simulate these flows while doing functional testing increases coverage and testing efficiency.
Bundling is no lost concept and getting multiple solutions or services for your money is always a better option. In the realm of testing both functional and performance testing are required to have the best test coverage and promote quality application development. Qyrus’ Performance Profiling for web, allows for performance testing in line with functional. No need to recreate steps, spin up instances or environments, reuse functional tests for performance testing purposes. Coupled with visual and graphical reporting, this essential feature is further enhanced to provide optimal testing experience. That’s all for this week’s Feature Friday, join us next week as we explore every corner of the Qyrus testing platform.
