With the demand for mobile and web apps increasing every day, software developing companies are releasing millions of apps every year. As per Statista, users worldwide downloaded around 77 billion apps in the first half of 2023. With so many apps available for selection, users are satisfied only with apps that are perfect in functionality and user experience. They ensure that any app they install offers a smooth and seamless user experience consistently. If they do not, users reject or uninstall it promptly.
Numerous app rejections by users due to performance-related issues in recent times have made developers rethink their testing strategy and realize the importance of incorporating performance testing before app deployment.
Understanding the Significance of Performance Testing
Every app should ideally be tested under different operating conditions to ensure it performs as expected. By conducting performance testing, you can assess the application’s behavior under varying conditions and find performance issues. As a result, organizations are focusing on mobile app performance testing.
Performance testing evaluates the following:
- Assesses an app against performance metrics like response time, resource utilization, or throughput under varying workloads and conditions
- Gets insights about the application’s performance and identifies the areas for improvement
- Simulates realistic scenarios to replicate systems usage and user interactions; for example, it can simulate a specific number of concurrent users or subject the application to heavy workloads
Benefits of performance testing
- Reliability: Organizations can ensure their systems are stable, reliable, and capable of handling loads without experiencing downtime or crashes by rectifying issues like scalability limitations and system failures
- Optimization: It lets you eliminate bottlenecks, fine-tune your applications, and ensure optimal performance
- Prevent loss of reputation: Organizations can minimize the risk of encountering critical issues that can lead to consequences, like financial loss, customer dissatisfaction, or damage to reputation
- Assessment of scalability: There is a need for applications to handle huge workloads and increasing user demands. With performance testing, you can identify the app’s scalability limits and make required optimizations to ensure the system can handle future growth
Best Performance Testing Tools for 2023:
A suitable automation testing tool should fit your project requirements and provide the benefits discussed above. Now, let us compare the following tools and their performance testing features to select the best one out of them:
1. TestGrid
This reliable automation testing platform is favored by most organizations as it offers robust capabilities that no other tool can offer. It provides valuable performance metrics that help identify issues early in the development stage. As a result, you can avoid financial losses that can occur due to post-production issues and deliver error-free products to the market.
Key features of TestGrid:
- Derive rich analytics and optimize your applications with real-device testing
- Discover bottlenecks without wasting time on extensive scripting or test correlation
- Deliver flawless software by leveraging real browsers to run tests and monitor results
- Repeatedly run tests any number of times with the same precision every time
- Being a cloud-based platform, you can easily scale your testing efforts up or down as per your evolving needs
- Get access to hundreds of real devices anytime time you need them to conduct tests
- Features like test reuse, enhanced test coverage, and rapid issue discovery help you save costs in the long run
- Quick alerts and faster debugging allow you to prevent errors before each release
- Conduct as many tests as you want in parallel, saving precious time and resources
2. HeadSpin
It enables testers to solve performance issues across applications, networks, devices, and third-party interfaces. Furthermore, the tool offers useful insights with practical recommendations to testers and developers.
Key features of HeadSpin:
- Test on real devices connected to real networks
- Helps testers identify performance issues before they affect users
- Flexibility to use your preferred automation frameworks
- Assist in improving performance and UX through analysis
- Lets you streamline DevOps processes with a lower turnaround time
3. Kobiton
It is a platform that is preferred because of its performance testing capabilities and flexible real device options, such as a private or public cloud or the option to test on-premise as well. You can rely on the tool to get reliable observations into app and device-specific performance metrics.
Key features of Kobiton
- Allows creation of automated test scripts for manual tests that you can execute on multiple devices parallelly
- A feature called Payload capture lets testers evaluate crucial app and website-specific performance
- Lets you test on any real devices, reducing the dependence on simulators
- Integrates quickly into your CI/CD process
- Captures detailed logs, including system metrics, like memory and battery performance
4. Apache JMeter
This performance testing tool is mainly used as a website load-testing tool for web service applications. Being an open-source testing tool, it does not require advanced infrastructure for load testing.
Key features of Apache JMeter:
- It is highly portable and offers support for all Java-based applications
- Due to its user-friendly GUI, fewer scripting efforts are needed
- Supports multiple load injectors that are managed by a single controller
- Facilitates easy correlation because of its ability to extract data from popular response formats like HTML, XML, or other textual formats
- Can be used to simulate heavy loads on a server, group of servers, object, or network to analyze overall performance under varying load types
5. BlazeMeter
This platform enables continuous testing and offers unique features to testers, like mock services or monitoring. BlazeMeter even allows scaling up to 2 million users.
Key features of BlazeMeter:
- It allows testers to easily create lightweight virtual services for any test
- Lets you extract data from TDM Database models and generate synthetic test data
- Easy validation of test data and complex workflows
- Lets you use your existing Selenium scripts
- Allows easy running of tests with no expertise needed
Conclusion
Performance testing is an essential element of software testing if you want to prevent irregularities in performance across different operating systems and load conditions.
The right automation platform with appropriate performance testing capabilities will ensure that the products you deliver are flawless, stable, and reliable.
TestGrid is the most preferred scriptless end-to-end automation testing platform for performance testing. It helps you derive performance metrics through which you can get deep insights into your applications and prevent bugs that can lead to severe problems in the future.
With TestGrid, you can optimize web and mobile applications in the early stages of production, shorten your release cycles, and deliver perfect products confidently to the market.
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