by Koushik Sethuraman, AVP – Digital Experience Markets Lead at Qualitest
Performance Assurance has evolved from traditional Performance Testing to modern, broader Performance Engineering, which enhanced the ways of working, instilled ‘Performance by Design’ approach, and helped Engineering to become more end-user centric. The evolution is driven by technology, data, and the push to have the best UX and CX possible.
Today, the solution and design techniques that put an emphasis on providing the best digital offering and user experience has become an absolute priority for brands. This incorporates designing responsive and adaptive applications, use of Microservices architecture, leverage of Cloud, serverless and edge computing, infusion of AI and Blockchain technology, and benefits from the acceleration that 5G technology has to offer. The above requires a paradigm shift in consideration of performance engineering activities, a shift that will assure we are advancing while improving resilience and the overall User Experience elements.
The following techniques can be exercised to enforce this process transformation.
Step one: Requirements engineering
Clearly define your Performance Requirements and expected service levels. The latter are critical to design a solution; a requirement that is unclear to the developers will be unclear to the quality engineers.
Step two: The cheat-list
- Compose an end-to end strategy for your systems. This enforces a consistent process to be followed to validate changes.
- Invest in installing appropriate test and monitoring tools.
- Prepare your data – it’s a must. Data plays an important role when it comes to performance validation at scale and evaluate for real world scenarios.
- Capture (baseline) performance KPIs, as strategy without these, and without success criteria mapped to requirements, is a route to failure.
Pro Tip #1: Failing is good as long as it happens fast
- Include performance validations at every step of the development life cycle, that could help in detecting problems earlier.
- Factor in time to validate the holistic performance of your systems – be it end-to-end tests or day-in-life tests.
Pro Tip #2: Ensure you have the right team with the right skills
- Invest in training and development and ensure to upgrade the skills of your team in the performance engineering and resiliency concepts and tool sets.
Step three: Set up for full stack observability
Observability helps decision makers to connect all the dots; your user-centric and infrastructure performance metrics, valuable data from application logs, and user session traces will all help narrow down the performance hotspots and remediate them quicker, and subsequently improve UX.
Measuring performance metrics is not a nice-to-have option anymore; it is now a responsibility. Minimising hardware resource consumption, energy consumption and heat dissipation through performance validations will be crucial. This could be reducing the size of the page, caching contents closer to the end users and minimising data transfer, designing applications that would consume less energy, or scaling of hardware resources on demand to minimise the resource and energy consumption – all to ensure overall sustainability and be socially responsible.
At the same time, with systems being consistently performant, reliable, and sustainable, the end users’ confidence and satisfaction increases.
Pro Tip #3: The expected unexpected
Explore hypothesis scenarios that could possibly arise in production. This can include an unexpected traffic surge during a seasonal promotions or peak periods, a mandatory push of security patches or OS updates to your infrastructure. Try those scenarios and practice remediation steps in your performance environment. This assures systems are scalable, reliable, and available to end customers. Most importantly, it gives confidence in the resilience of your application to withstand load and performance related challenges.
Step five: Introduce continuous testing
Creating car units quicker in a production line is an example of DevOps; it’s about deploying as many changes as possible, as quickly possible, into production. Design to ensure the car operates reliably and predictably and has an ability to flag risks to the user and heal by itself is the concept of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering); it’s about the ability of your live systems to operate with consistent performance.
Introduce performance activities such as a continuous validation process in the development cycle.
Build alerting and auto-healing techniques that prove it works in performance environments and infuse the process onto the live systems.
Listen to your production systems, they say a lot!
Production systems provide so much data about your end customers and infrastructure. Monitor, learn and introduce changes to the performance assurance processes as necessary.
The landscape of technology, standards, and best practices is continually evolving based on user expectations. With all the above steps taken – be it shift-left, shift-right, DevOps, SRE, and early testing – it is imperative to think “what’s next from here?”.
You have the answers, just use your data
Leveraging data will be vital, whether it’s types of requirements coming from the business, types of tests executed, test results, defects identified, and the fixes provided, statistics from live systems etc. Availability of quality data could inform AI and Machine Learning use cases that could benefit both the business and your IT function. For example, it can predict the types of tests and data conditions that must be considered for a certain type of a requirement, predict failure in production based on observability measurements, and install auto-healing procedures.
In the near future, proactive and intelligent problem prevention mechanisms will be the focus, using AI and Machine Learning in the process of offering the best digital and customer experience.
Qualitest is the world’s largest, independent managed services provider of AI-led quality engineering and testing solutions. Qualitest help brands make the transition through every stage of the digital assurance journey, from moving beyond functional testing to adopting new innovations such as automation, AI, blockchain and XR.
Qualitest offers a wide range of personalized quality engineering that both designs and delivers solutions that leverage deep, industry-specific knowledge for a variety of sectors, including technology, telecommunications, healthcare, finance, defense, media, utilities, and retail.
