Collaborative Load Testing Strategies for Agile Teams

Collaborative load testing or load testing in an agile environment is nothing but it ensures that our application can perform under heavy traffic load. The process of load testing is to test the application's performance under heavy traffic and ensure the scalability and SLA responses and violations of each service used in the application. This testing is one of the important methods to carry out before each product release. It ensures the stability, scalability, and actual performance of the application.

What is the Agile Process?

The agile process allows us to group a set of teams and divide the work among the team to create an application and deliver it to the testing team to test the developed component. In case of any issues in the developed component, the testing team can report it back to the development team. The development team can fix the issues and hand them to the testing team to test again.

1. Agile methodology allows this simplicity and recursive process to achieve the team goal within a short period. The agile process consists of scrum calls, sprint planning, sprint, daily standups, and so on.
2. Sprint is nothing but the 2 to 4 weeks to complete the development task and test the developed component within a sprint.

What is Agile Performance Testing?

Agile is the culture of diving into the work sprint-wise and developing the feature to deliver an application. In each team, there will be a set of developers, testers, scrum masters, and product owners. Here, the capacity planning is done at the start of the sprint. Capacity planning is nothing but how many hours in a day the team contributes regularly. After that development process will happen for the decided stories or tasks. Once development and code deployment are done, the tester will start their testing. This process is regularly happening for each sprint.

Performance testing is the process of testing the application performances, responses under heavy traffic or load, getting responses from services, the time required to load the application, regression testing, stress testing, and so on.

1. Now, when we combine performance testing in agile methodology, the testing process becomes even easier, and application, stability is also increased over time.
2. This is because we are carrying out the testing in each sprint for each feature development to avoid defects in future development processes or testing.
3. This allows the testing team to communicate about the issue they have observed and can know the loading time of the application or the performance of the application in each sprint. It ensures the high stability for an application.

Impact and Benefits of Performance Testing in Agile Environment

From the above context, we get to know that performance testing in an agile environment is the best way to keep the application stabilized. Let us see the benefits of performance testing in an Agile Environment.

1. Detect Errors Earlier: In Agile Performance testing, we are doing testing on a sprint basis. This will greatly help us to catch a very minimal amount of issues during Production release or before release deployment in another development environment. Since all the issues have been resolved on a sprint basis, it greatly helps to keep the application bug-free or bugless.

2. Defect Tracking: In cases of any issues, the tester will create the defect or bug in the storyboard or any other tool. That bug will be assigned under the developer's name to resolve it within the sprint. It allows the team to easily track and close the defects within the given sprint.

3. Enables Continuous Testing: Continuous Testing is one of the best practices to carry out in agile methodology. It increases the overall testing performance. If a bug is found it will be reported to the development team. Once the development team fixes the issue whole application or regression testing along with smoke testing will be happening again. This testing will continue until the final fix is made.

4. Ensure Load Balancing: As we do the testing on each sprint, we can find how many times that is needed for an application to load under different traffic rates. This application performance can be known through performance testing. If it takes too much time then that will be reported and resolved.

5. Error-Free Delivery: After the agile process, many startups evolved in the market. This is because the performance testing in agile methodology brings out the error free or bug-free features or components of an application on each sprint. At the end of the production release, it is always an error-free application product.

6. Increased Team Performance: The performance testing involved in each sprint allows the tester to test the application on a regular sprint basis and report it to the development team to resolve the issue. This greatly helps the team to increase their performance in terms of error-free application delivery, also there is increased productivity among all team members.

7. Load Testing: Performance testing carries out the load testing to ensure the system's performance under a heavy workload. It confirms under how many service transactions or users the application is working fine.

8. Scalability Testing: Performance testing carries out scalability testing to check the performance of the application by increasing the number of users or transactions to check the stability of the application.

9. Stress Testing: Stress testing is also part of performance testing to check at what point in time the system will fail under what condition and that failure will be overcome by the application. This can be ensured in this testing.

Performance Testing Activities

Let us see what are the steps or activities carried out in performance testing.

Step 1: Test Requirement Analysis

The first step is to know the business features and actual outcome of the application. It will help the testers to plan accordingly regarding what we are going to test. How the testing should be carried out? What are the different scenarios involved in the testing? How much test data is required? What are the testing tools needed? All these requirements will be analyzed first and planned.

Step 2: Test Environment

Now, the tester needs to set up the test environment by choosing the best testing tool required to do testing. All the prerequisites of that testing tool need to be installed to do the testing. Testers will carry out both manual and automation testing to achieve 100% testing coverage.

Step 3: Preparation of Test Script

Here, testers need to prepare the test scripts for different scenarios involved in one feature. Testers need to execute these test scripts while doing automation testing. During load tests, they set up the test scripts to hit all possible services to check the performance of the application. Some of these scripts can be reused for other scenarios as well.

Step 4: Collecting Test Data

Collecting user test data is one of the challenging processes for testers. If the feature includes various scenarios then the test data for each scenario is required to test the feature. These collected user data will be utilized by developers as well to check their development process.

Step 5: Testing the Feature

Once all the above processes are done. It's timing for testing the application. Testers will automate the scripts in the testing tool to check the feature with different scenarios. They do manual testing as well to catch other issues if it's not covered under automation testing.

Step 6: Test Report Generation

At this time, testers will prepare or document the issues with user data and hand it over to developers to fix the issue. Testers also create defects in the defect tracking system or the sprint board to track the defects. Once the issue is resolved that defect will be closed by the tester.

Post-production Monitoring

Once the application is deployed to the production server. Now, it's time for testers to check the application on the production server.

Step 1: Smoke Testing

This testing is carried out by developers once the deployment is done. Developers will usually check whether the updated changes are reflected, the page is loading, the URL is working, and so on. Once they have done the smoke testing, they will hand it over to testers to start the regression testing.

Step 2: Regression Testing

This testing is carried out by testers. Here, they do end-to-end testing for the deployed application. They use different production user data to check the entire application. This testing mostly involves manual testing.

Step 3: Testing Report

In case of any issues, that will be reported to the development team. If the fix is small they will do it on that day or mostly they will push it to the next deployment release and testers will provide a sign-off by mentioning the issue. If there is no issue, testers will provide a sign-off with no issue statements.

Step 4: Maintenance

After the application is released, the maintenance or support team will take care of the application and monitor it 24/7. In case of any issues, that will be reported to the respective team.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, we can conclude that Performance Testing in Agile methodology is one of the best ways to achieve the application release with no error. It covers all possible kinds of testing to ensure the stability of the application under any circumstances. To be a skilled tester, it's best to follow the strategies of performance testing and it will be very helpful in your testing field.