One of the most costly and difficult tasks my test teams need to perform are performance tests. Most of the time performance testing requires specific tools that are expensive, to say the least. Special engineers are needed to deploy these tests. And for online applications that have a great deal of visitors performance testing becomes more  important these days.. Unfortunately performance tests are not only expensive, but also difficult to execute. Because performance needs a well normal performing environment, most performance tests can only be done on the acceptance environment (where applicable). But this is mostly too late. But how can this be improved?

Performance test tools

The performance of an application is becoming more and more important. So to know what the performance is and test against it is a task worth doing. Performance, load and stress test tools like HP LoadRunner or Borland SilkPerformer® are pretty costly. Most of the time they are worth the expense, but in these economic days they’re still a large investment.

Cloud computing can offer a solution for this. A few tools are available these days that can use the cloud to generate the load needed for a sufficient performance test. And these tools are not the expensive tools I talked about earlier. Most of these tools are much cheaper because the technology isn’t as complex as in ‘normal’ performance testing tools. They use the availability and cheap pricing of the cloud to execute the tests at a fraction of the cost. In this post from Dion Hincliffe you can see what cloud computing actually costs and compare this to the licencing of HP LoadRunner and Borland SilkPerformer®.

Performance of the environment

But the availability of a cheap and good performance test tool doesn’t solve the issue of the test environment. As said is the environment best suited to execute performance tests the acceptance environment. This one should be ‘production-like’ in capability, suitability and performance. But most of the project I did either the acceptance environment wasn’t production-like or didn’t exist. When it was available it’s always too late to execute the performance tests. To solve an issue you have to dig deep in the code or database to upgrade the performance. Which results in a lot of retesting for all the areas of the application that have been adjusted.

For all this cloud computing can also offer a solution. When you have a testing environment in the cloud you can upgrade your environment to act performance-like at will. And decrease it when wanted. Just add or remove extra servers, nodes, disk capacity, memory, or… when you want this done. Thus creating a production-like environment when needed. Then you can execute your performance tests as early as you want and, subsequently, adjust it! This can be repeated when wanted.

Cloud computing can help the testing of the performance of your application. By giving the option of a less costly type of test execution tool. And giving a production-like environment when needed.