How to do performance testing using DevOps

Today, organizations started to embrace DevOps for faster releases and high-quality software in less time. Every company needs high-performing applications to increase user engagement and deliver a great user experience. DevOps continuous testing necessitates performance, security, and other testing methods to deliver high-quality applications. For the 

scalability and reliability, performance testing plays a vital role before the release of the software applications into the market. 

Let’s understand the meaning of Performance testing:

Performance testing is a type of non-functional testing method which is performed to verify the software performance, speed, scalability, and responsiveness. The aim of this testing is to separate performance bottlenecks from the software product or application. And to ensure absolute performance like fluctuations in the network bandwidths, varying user loads, etc. 

Benefits of performance testing:

• It improves the speed of the websites with common issues such as broken images, frequent timeouts, content-related issues, etc. which brings difficulties in the website speed. This testing technique helps in identifying these issues and resolving them.  

• This software testing removes the critical bugs or errors and performance bottlenecks from the software applications before it goes live. 

• It ensures scalability, reliability, and robustness of the software applications which can handle the customers even during peak loads. It also ensures that the software product or application that works well under unexpected conditions such as user load, fluctuating networks, etc. 

• This testing helps to enhance the customer experience since users don't want to prefer slow-loading applications and websites. 

• It helps to generate more revenue as it is obvious that better application performance helps in generating more revenue for the company. End-users only prefer to download seamless applications, especially for the eCommerce, Healthcare, and Telecom sector applications.  

Various types of performance testing: 

•  Load Testing
•  Stress Testing
•  Endurance Testing
•  Spike Testing
•  Volume Testing
•  Scalability Testing

Performance testing in DevOps CI/CD pipeline

•  Code and build stage: In this stage, the DevOps performance testing continues with the continuous performance testing which includes unit performance testing. Also, it ensures that the smallest unit of the software product is performing in isolation or not.

•  Integration stage: After the unit performance testing, the performance testing is done at the integration stage in which the smallest unit of the software product is integrated.    

•  Test stage: In this state, the system-level performance testing is done to ensure that the software performs as per the requirements. If the system-level performance tests are passed then the software product moves to the next stage which is the deploy stage.

•  Release and deploy stage: Once the test stage is completed then in the release and deploy stage the load testing and real user monitoring are performed to make sure the software handles the user load effectively in the production environment.