Software Stress Testing Protects Enterprise Apps

An organization has option to evaluate the quality of an enterprise application through both manual and automated software testing options. But the test strategy must consider evaluating both functional as well as non-functional aspects of the application. Along with the look, feel, features and functionalities of the software, it is also important to test beyond its normal operational capacity. Software stress testing is used to determine the stability and operational capacity of an application.

The key objective of the non-functional testing is to ensure that the enterprise apps do not crash in the live environment due to insufficient memory, disk space or other computational resources. Along with considering the correct behavior of the enterprise application under normal circumstances, the testing further aim to protect it in production environment by emphasizing on availability, robustness and error handing under a heavy load.

How to Protect Enterprise Apps in Live Environment through Stress Testing

Finds Critical Memory Problems
Often enterprise apps crash due to lack of adequate memory. But the flaws will not reflect in a single instance. So stress tests need to be carried out constantly to find the critical memory problems and concurrency bugs. A simple and straightforward stress test is further effective in identifying all flaws that makes the application crash. The QA engineers can simply keep on putting additional load on the server to decide the stress level required to make the software crash.

Automate Tests
The application needs to be tested repeatedly and beyond its normal operational capacity. Unlike load testing, stress testing aims to determine the load under which the application crashes, along with what causes the failure. So the testing must be carried out continuously to ensure that the app does not crash in live environment. As the test cases need to be executed repeatedly can be automated to get better results, stress testing can also be automated. An organization also has option to choose from several stress testing tools to save both time and effort.

Continuous Integration
Along with stress testing automation, an organization also needs to concentrate on continuous integration. As most enterprises do not automate the deployment process completely, the chances of human error increase substantially. Thus, continuous integration becomes essential to minimize these potential manual errors. However, an enterprise has to invest in custom hardware to facilitate continuous integration. But the tools and hardware procured for stress testing automation can be used to integrate additional tests at the enterprise level.

Deploy Developers
In addition to the hardware, continuous integration will further require the involvement of developers and operations. The automated tests must be developed and coded properly. Similarly, the hardware must be maintained on a regular basis. So each organization has to make and implement a continuous integration strategy by involving the app developers, QA engineers and operations. The seamless coordination between these distinct teams will make it easier to decide the load under which the application crashes.

Keep Adding Heavy Load
The stress testing can be further effectuated by putting heavy loads to make the enterprise app struggle. It is always important to keep in mind that the stress testing software applications are being executed with the sole aim of making the app struggle as the load increase. Along with increasing the level of load applied on the app constantly, the stress testing needs to be done again and again without allowing the app to recover even once. The performance of an application under heavy load can be determined accurately only by trying to break it.

However, stress testing must be integrated seamlessly with load, fail-over, reliability, baseline and targeted infrastructures to generate more accurate and reliable test results. The test results can also be used to take several important decisions related to the launch and promotion of the specific enterprise application.

You can hire testers from top web application testing companies in India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide QA testing services. If you would like to hire software testers experts from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

Top 10 Cloud Computing Load Test and Performance Monitoring Tools

In today’s technologically advancing age, more and more businesses are embracing new and latest techniques of creating a niche in the industry. The latest being the trend of cloud computing. Since its inception, the IT industry especially has embraced the trend that makes business processes easy and swift. The newly evolved approach can easily be termed as an upgraded adaptation of utility computing. A growing number of IT communities have already adapted to the trend and started unleashing their potential at their best.

Today, a good number of cloud based technologies and tools are available in the market facilitating the different facets of IT development. The rapid pace of advancement has also made way for tools catering to varied aspects of testing involving both performance and load management. The benefits of integrating the cloud based tools of testing are many like flexibility of use and cost reduction (usage charges, licensing infrastructure). It also helps you choose the right kind of tool required for the job and start working immediately.

Here is a quick look at some of the acclaimed companies and the top 10 cloud based testing tools and solutions released by them, which help in performance monitoring and load testing:

1. SOASTA: A pioneer in the field of cloud testing, this helps the industries make use of the leading service of web testing for performance optimization and improved reliability and scalability of applications and websites. The CloudTest from SOASTA leverages the cloud resources for facilitating performance monitoring and load testing. Additionally, it also replicates traffic that hits an application or a website from inside or outside the firewall. The effortless integration of the CloudTest’s monitoring, test design, and reporting offers all that you need to produce high quality services and web applications at cost effective rates.

2. Keynote: An internationally acclaimed service provider dealing with mobile cloud monitoring and testing, Test Perspective of Keynote provides comprehensive solutions geared towards the enhancement of online experience. It helps companies analyze the performance of their websites, applications, and content on a diverse set of browsers, mobile devices, and networks. The exclusive business model of Keynote allows you to improve productivity while, controlling costs with the reliable and striking performance of its on-demand measurement and test services and products.

3. Monitis: The Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework is another flexible and comprehensive monitoring solution for the IT industry that is entirely cloud based. This allows consolidating various aspects of monitoring like application, backend, and website facilitating an all-in-one central service. The platform offers easy customization opportunity and can be used for managing a diverse range of IT assets like servers, switches, routers, DNS, processes, websites, databases, VOIP devices, and any other kind of IP devices. This particular solution helps companies get a complete view on the performance and health of their systems.

4. BrowserMob: The monitoring service of this particular provider makes use of real web browsers to replicate the interaction of a user with your website. Irrespective of being equally priced to the monitoring service style of simplistic ‘ping’ that only goes through individual URLs, this takes a step ahead in the service approach. The usage of real browsers enables you to have a check on the response of the individual objects alongside verifying the functionality of your website in its entirety. This particular approach also involves ensuring that third-party components like gadgets, content delivery networks, advertisement, and analytics does not affect your website negatively.

5. Cloudslueth: This particular solution allows businesses to monitor and have a real time check of their own cloud application. All you need to do is submit a particular URL and the service provide will do the monitoring of the cloud application on your behalf. The aspects of availability measurements and live performance are specially monitored.

6. GFI: The MAX RemoteManagement of GFI enables easy monitoring of different aspects of your clients like remote offices, bandwidth usage, servers, ISP connection, raid arrays, and the website. In simple words, this particular service allows monitoring the principle parts of the infrastructure of your network and takes care of the clients proactively maintaining a minimum cost of the hardware avoiding costly downtime.

7. LoadStorm: This particular approach of load testing enables the developers to have complete knowledge about the response of their applications when put under high volume of HTTP traffic. This particular service offers an increasing number of cloud resources in the hands of the developers enabling them to enhance or improve the performance of the applications of the web. With this, you can develop your own test plans and produce maximum 50,000 concurrent users in practical scenarios.

8. InterMapper: The Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer you solutions that are critical to your business and InterMapper ensures the continuous operation of your services in a cost-effective approach. The CloudWatch technology released by AWS gathers the performance metrics for all virtual servers functioning in cloud. InterMapper runs a query of these metrics for monitoring the status of an Amazon ec2 Instance.

9. CloudHarmony: This particular testing solution is still in beta. However, you may make use of the continuously updated extensive list of benchmarks for viewing and comparing the performance metrics from different cloud services and providers.

10. CloudTools: This set of tools allows deployment of various testing and managing JAVA EE applications on Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) of Amazon and VMware environments.

The above-mentioned performance monitoring and load testing tools allow a better analysis of the IT infrastructure maintaining a smooth and swift approach.

The above-mentioned performance monitoring and load testing tools allow a better analysis of the IT infrastructure maintaining a smooth and swift approach. While taking hiring decisions, choose a certified load testing team which has in-depth experience in doing load tests on varying loads.

We provide load testing services. If you have a need to hire software testers, please feel free to ask us about the certifications of our testers. We will be glad to share all our achievements at Mindfire Solutions.

Load Testing: The Ultimate Way to Control the Queue

As the current trend goes, developers are into the habit of releasing brand new mobile apps with an aim to generate a queue for the users before a comprehensive support system can be built up for their app to fix evident issues. From the usability point of view, implementing a queue is indeed a great idea. It generates a lot of excitement within your users and also succeeds in adding that exclusivity factor to an application while the developer can deal with the scalability concerns in parallel.

However, let’s have a look at the other side of the coin. Having a queue may indeed be exciting for a few days but making users wait for the applications while the issues are being sorted out may prove to be a very risky bet for the developer or application owner, particularly when the switching cost for a user is very low. This gives a lot of scope to the impatient user to cross out your application and switch over to the subsequent one, without even getting the chance to appreciate the quality of your application.

There is off course a brilliant way to reduce this risk factor, and that’s where Load Testing comes in. It is the process of subjecting your system to high load and participation and evaluating the response. So, before making your application/app public, try to figure out the application’s performance against peak load conditions, maximum anticipated load. This will help you understand whether all the systems will synchronize in the proper manner and manage the burden of the entire user base.

Significance of Load Testing Services

The fundamental goal of Load Testing is to make sure than an application will register a good performance, in the production stage itself. With the help of load testing, you will be able to find out whether you application will cease to function or function inappropriately under heavy load and if the application is sturdy enough to fulfill the pre-determined performance levels. Moreover, load testing also gives a fair idea as to the number of users the website or application can simultaneously handle.

Some of the common performance issues that applications may face are the following:

• Issues related to software configuration (for database, web server, load balancers and so on)
• Problems arising from improper network configuration
• Imperfect software code
• Inadequate hardware assets

The sole means to identify these performance setbacks at the production stage is load testing, i.e., simulating a plethora of concurrent users. It also has a positive impact on the company’s Return on Investment by reducing the financial cost arising out of service interruptions and poor performance.

Generally speaking, this type of testing is most applicable to multiple-user systems, usually those operating on a client-server model, like web servers. But load testing can also be done for other software systems. For instance, you can always verify whether a financial package is suitable enough to process years of data and create a report accordingly or if a word processor can read an exceptionally bulky document.

Things to consider while Load Testing

• The following things need to be considered in order to ensure that your load testing is successful:
• The load goals should be clearly defined and measurable in terms of relevant parameters like requests per second, concurrent users, etc.
• Specify the goals based on real-time scenarios. For example, when you are setting the load goals in terms of number of concurrent users, specify according to the expected number within a particular time span.
• In case your application is brand new and there are no previous or specified server logs, take help from those involved in the company’s promotional activities and decide the peak.
• Set the response time based on the user acceptance quotient.

Load Testing is the ultimate means to identify the shortcomings in your website or application before launching, to ensure that even the user who is the earliest in the queue, is not facing any performance setbacks. In the long run, this will help you rise above the low ratings and unfavorable reviews, and make your application seamlessly sail through.

We provide software performance testing services. Our certified load testers can help increase the robustness of your application. To know more how, please visit Mindfire Solutions.