Performance, load, and stress testing allow you to pinpoint system bottlenecks. To conduct performance and load testing you need to engage in a carefully controlled process of business transactions measurement and analysis. Stress testing by other hand, tries to break the system by overwhelming its resources or by taking resources away from it. The main purpose behind this approach is to define the limit of system failure and evaluate how the system reacts to failure. Performance and load testing demands a controlled environment and repeatable measurements, while stress testing joyfully induces chaos and unpredictability.

Load testing activities are composed by six different steps. You start to plan and design your load test cases according to your performance requirements. Create virtual user scripts that simulate human user interaction with the system under test. Create load test procedures specifying the load test cases, virtual user number and load injectors. Start executing load test procedures, monitor their execution and finally analyze the execution results. Tune the system under test if necessary and repeat the executions until transactions performance time reach acceptable values.

Load testing plan design

Successfully load testing requires you develop a thorough test plan. A clearly defined test plan will ensure that all load test procedures that you develop will accomplish your load test objectives. Design your load test cases by defining transactions to simulate, performance response times, hits per second, acceptable error levels and expected number of concurrent users. You start to define and manage load test cases providing all the information needed.

Creating virtual user scripts

Virtual users emulate human users interacting with the application under test. A virtual user script contains the actions that each user performs during the load test procedure execution. These scripts are created with QualityMate for Load Testing – Script Editor tool.

Creating load test procedures

A load test procedure includes a list of load test cases that will be executed from specified machines (where QualityMate Load Agent’s installed) simulating a predefined number of virtual users.

Executing load test procedures

The load is emulated during the load test procedure execution by instructing multiple virtual users to perform tasks simultaneously. Before executing the load test procedure you must determine how the virtual users will behave during the simulation.

Monitoring load test procedure execution

While executing a load test procedure you can monitor transactions performance times, errors, and machines performance counters, like operating systems, databases, web servers and application components.

Analyzing load test procedure results

During load test procedure execution QualityMate for Load Testing stores all data in a central repository. Later on you can use available graphs and reports to analyze your load test procedure execution results.