Performance Testing vs Performance Engineering
The difference between performance testing and performance engineering may not be defined initially since both are closely related, but there are a few key differences between them. Simply, we may say that performance testing falls under performance engineering and performance testing uncovers the potential performance related defects & bottleneck issues and provides analysis reports to developers for resolution. Performance engineering takes it a step further by considering performance concerns to the next level by helping developers to meet business case requirements and industry standards for speed, scalability, and sustainability.
To better understand whether your organization is doing performance testing or performance engineering, consider the following descriptions:
Performance Testing – Performance testing is a process in which critical business flows/ user journeys are automated and simulates realistic concurrent end-user loads and access patterns in controlled test environments to determine a system’s performance wr.to scalability, speed, and stability. Performance test results are analyzed depending on a set of metrics that allow test engineers to identify potential bottlenecks and provide recommendations.
Some of key metrics associated with performance testing included as:
- Transaction throughput
- Transaction response time
- Concurrent user loads
- Server Throughput
- Browser / Cache performance
- Code performance
- Server resource utilization
Performance Engineering – Performance engineering is a discipline of using best practices and applying techniques in all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC) to help systems meet performance requirements and ensuring that the final product is optimized appropriately. The activities involved in the performance engineering focus on good architecture design, better UI/UX design, better code structure, and understanding business use cases to build the system with industry standards and high performance.
Performance engineering suggests pro-active involvement in each stage of SDLC to identify specific problems and causes while designing the system. This help performance testing to design an approach within the development framework to apply techniques and incorporate industry standards to achieve a stable, scalable, and performance-optimized system.
Performance Engineering Approach
Performance of any application depends on various components of overall system architecture at different levels i.e. Application, Infrastructure, Network and Database level. Below approach helps performance engineers to identify the root cause of any potential issues by running the performance test at different layers.
